The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.
For a context: France relies heavily on automotive transport, plus it's a home to enormous agricultural sector, tractors are literally everywhere in the country during the summer. To a certain degree, structurally it resembles USA a lot.
However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.
The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption.
Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015.
Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.
shocking how quickly we went from "how can we contain global warming to 1.5C increase?" to "we've (hopefully) unlocked a massive new corporate revenue source, screw everything else"
But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.
So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.
BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...
If enough climate systems collapse, lots of existing farms will no longer be viable. That means famine and migration, which means war, which means lots of death. I don't know anyone who thinks we'll see extinction (outside of possible "hothouse earth" scenarios, where we become a second Venus) but societal collapse is definitely on the table. Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science.
> Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science.
Please show me sources that the current emissions would lead to "lots of death"? Show me any decent modelling of emissions vs annual death?
This one shows a million more deaths annually if we have even more emissions in 100 years than now. Million more deaths is around 2% increase in death rate compared to the hypothetical without emissions.
This means even in the worst case of higher emissions in the future than now, also no technological progress, we would still be in better living conditions in the future than now.
... Do you understand feedback loops? Yes? Interconnected climate systems where one system hits a threshold and accelerates change in one direction which causes another system to hit a threshold faster causing a cascade of systems to fall over until all the thresholds have been reached? Why are you showing me a document about the economic impact of "current" carbon levels applied linearly as if this system grows predicably and linearly and the economy and future technology grow as some linear function of those inputs? Do you not even understand the basic premise that the people you're criticizing operate from? If not, why are you talking about this like you know anything about it?
Thanks for showing me about tipping points. Tipping points exist at every level, you could have shown this mechanism in 1800's and asked people to stop/slow development.
In fact I can justify not just net zero, but net negative emissions and stalling of all progress of humanity itself by using your article.
It would have been another story if there were some graph between emissions vs probability of hitting an irreversible tipping point. At least this gives us a prescriptive analysis on how to deal with the tradeoffs.
Your article contains NONE of that. And I posit that it doesn't contain it because the real probabilities are much lower.
You can't make serious policies by handwaving tipping points. No country should immediately go net zero because of your article or even the studies your article cites.
I get that it feels good to be in a position to scold people into stopping progress. I'm willing to learn new perspectives - at least come up with a emissions vs probability quantified. Till then its just scolding and handwaving.
I think I'm much more compatible with my colleagues from the said countries, who are actually nice people, than I am with the rabid fascists having this kind of a take.
> The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself.
That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".
> They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
> What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before?
It’s not that it did not happen before, civilisations rose up and disappeared several times in the past. It’s just that it is happening now, largely driven by climate issues.
What we are seeing now is regions becoming uninhabitable, crises sending waves of refugees, a dramatic shift towards nationalism in the West, which is terribly ill-equipped to solve global problem and is leading to a progressive crumbling of the international rules-based order. The US gave up on any pretense of sanity and went on a shooting match with Iran, throwing a wrench in the economies of a whole bunch of countries in Asia. Iran itself is in a terrible situation, with a lot of the country running dry. Trump of course is not a direct consequence of global warming, but it helps with the civilisation altering bits and adds to instability.
Europe is under its third heat wave of the year, all of them having been comparable to the historic ones from 1976 and 2003. This is also having a destabilising effect on several governments that are completely feckless, having spent 20 years trying to convince themselves that it was not happening, and was no big deal anyway.
These weather phenomena, along things like tropical storms in the Atlantic, are of course not new, but their frequency and magnitude is increased by global warming. They are currently costing billions and dealing with their consequences is not going to get cheaper.
> Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
I can. For example, the French Revolution was fueled by crop failures in the couple of years before due to particularly bad weather, related to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The revolutions of 1848 came after about 4 years of crop failures due to bad weather again.
The point is not that it never happened before. The Earth used to be much hotter (and also much colder). The environment used to not have humans around and it was fine. Revolutions and wars, and societal collapse are not new. Look at the late Bronze Age collapse if you want to have an idea of how bad it can realistically get. It’s not the end of the world, not even of humanity, but still a thoroughly unpleasant period to live in.
The point is that this is going to happen not because we rolled a bad dice, but because we’re bloody idiots and are doing it to ourselves.
"Climate conspiracy"? Like you, mean, the conspiracy of climate scientists to publish facts to the best of their understanding?
I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of course, we can't know for sure what the consequences are untill we do the experiment, which in this case means potentially destroying large sections of the biosphere and living with increasingly destructive weather patterns. Surely that risk is worth at least legislating that hyperscalers need to spend some of their billions on solar panels?
> But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for
Show me academic consensus showing that more than 1% of our species will go extinct within 100 years if we continue the emissions as now? I assume that's a reasonable characterisation of "mass extinction" and "on track for".
Oh I wasn't talking about humans. I should probably have pointed that out. There's some scenarios like catastrophic crop failure and so on that might lead to that, but frankly I doubt it.
I was referring more to everything else. Corals, certain insects, polar bears, salamanders and so on. With some quick googling it appears that the "Bramble Cay Melomys" is the first species so far to be declared extinct because of climate change, but the number that seems to be thrown around is that an average of 18% of terrestrial life will be critically endangered by 2100 in a scenario with 2 degrees warming. I can't be bothered with figuring out what degree of academic consensus there is around that number, but I think it's reasonable to assume that there's at least some kind of consensus about "more than 1%".
It’s anxiety about tipping points more than conspiracy theories. If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity. You may be insulated enough from the direct effects but what about what they trigger? Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices, extreme weather, and dysfunctional migration.
We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Most conspiracy theories think food grows in supermarkets and because they have a job which pays them a good global income they can just pay a bit more.
> If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity
Its exactly the people in the third world that don't need climate change lecture because it is absolutely needed to increase their energy and emissions output to reduce deaths.
Lots of people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, India _already die_ not due to climate change but lack of productivity.
They definitely don't want holier than though westerners to tell them to reduce their emissions as if it doesn't come at any tradeoff whatsoever.
> Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices
False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
> We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its convenient to be vague about consequences. Then you can use the vagueness to oppose whatever you want. Don't like something someone's making? You can just say "but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is so you are not allowed to do that thing".
Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.
> False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000. The global average temperature anomaly has risen ~50% in the same period.
> but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is
We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse. For example, AMOC collapse would prevent much of Europe from growing enough food to sustain its population. Not an impossible problem but certainly not an easy one, especially in the context of a world already having to deal with moving fertile regions and mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East due to drought and extreme heat.
> Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.
This doesn't count innovation due to technology. For instance, a lot of data centres in the past like 1990's, indirectly contributed in a lot of ways in reducing poverty and deaths - improving supply chain logistics, increasing general efficiency, helping in biological and pharma science. Stopping industrialisation disallows any progress in such fields. In the last 200 years we have made progress in science and tech allowing us to fight back with the environment.
> The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000.
That doesn't count income rising, acknowledging you specified inflation adjusted.
You can verify this yourself: try to ask whether the average person today can buy more food with their income or less food. The answer is unambiguously more food because Americans have much more disposable income through social programs, better wages and so on.
> We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse.
Source? Please show any source that tells us something like: this much emissions causes this much death in the future with relative confidence. And the tipping point must map to some meaningful tipping point where death rate increases by a big amount.
The only few sources I can see tell me that even if we don't reduce emissions, even if we stall scientific progress we still increase the annual death rate by 2%.
We've been paying hefty excise taxes on gasoline in Europe for decades. Yet nothing has changed. Environmentalists still have the exact same demands and supposedly nothing positive has come from this. It has just made everything more expensive. So what's the point?
Actually a lot has changed -- the world passed peak oil and the benzine cars are practically done, while a lot of generation is now "green". It isn't enough to get it to C02 negative territory so far, but saying it's nothing is a bit counterfactual.
If you want to burn shit, you need to either not release CO2 somehow while doing it or suck it back from the the air somewhere and that second part isn't happening, because the emissions are mispriced.
They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.
If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).
Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.
The need for memes knows no bounds. In short order the majority of power usage worldwide will be for compute and newer generations will wonder how it took so long.
Okay and not exploding makes РБМК reactor 70% more expensive (maybe), but we kinda want it to not explode, I guess?
I understand that singling out datacenters specifically isn't really fair, but if they start accounting for 25% of the grid, then I have to pay for everybody's dancing JD Vance gifs even I don't look at them, at which point the line between communism and free market gets a bit blurry to me.
Alas I fear we are going to rapidly build a bunch of very hard to maintain and clean up inefficient small nuclear power systems, to power a lot of this. Not next year, no, but soon.
I don't understand why permits are given for new generation that is CO2 positive outside of exceptional cases or when it replaces even worse kind. It's insanity.
legality of the datacenters aside, I wonder why countries don't at least demand that they're totally carbon neutral. it's possible today. it's not like it's sci-fi.
I think most ways of obtaining carbon neutrality are a little bit BS, that's why.
An alternative is what Google is theoretically aiming for: being carbon-free. But they've already started using language describing it as a moonshot or idealistic goal so seems likely they'll abandon that
USA is partly a petrostate. To mitigate the climate catastrophe it would be important to ramp down fossil fuel production in a big hurry, but it's not in sight.
In Europe this is covered by the emission trading system (EU ETS) and datacenters have to share the same shrinking emissions quota as other industries.
There are laws in the EU that will save the planet, like drinking from soggy paper straws instead of plastic and requiring caps stay attached in plastic bottles.
And just to make sure, at least in Poland they now charge you $0.10 if you buy anything plastic until you bring it back to the grocery store empty.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 45.9 ms ] thread[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKg_BLqOet8
Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacen...
Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.
BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...
Often repeated everywhere as a trump card to get what they want - crush technological and economic progress.
Please show me sources that the current emissions would lead to "lots of death"? Show me any decent modelling of emissions vs annual death?
This one shows a million more deaths annually if we have even more emissions in 100 years than now. Million more deaths is around 2% increase in death rate compared to the hypothetical without emissions.
This means even in the worst case of higher emissions in the future than now, also no technological progress, we would still be in better living conditions in the future than now.
What is your answer to this?
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bf26af29f187c6f3a9f...
https://iiasa.ac.at/news/feb-2026/course-correction-needed-q...
In fact I can justify not just net zero, but net negative emissions and stalling of all progress of humanity itself by using your article.
It would have been another story if there were some graph between emissions vs probability of hitting an irreversible tipping point. At least this gives us a prescriptive analysis on how to deal with the tradeoffs.
Your article contains NONE of that. And I posit that it doesn't contain it because the real probabilities are much lower.
You can't make serious policies by handwaving tipping points. No country should immediately go net zero because of your article or even the studies your article cites.
I get that it feels good to be in a position to scold people into stopping progress. I'm willing to learn new perspectives - at least come up with a emissions vs probability quantified. Till then its just scolding and handwaving.
Worse than voluntarily inviting masses of incompatible cultures into western countries like we're already doing?
And while the populist right love importing incompatible cultures en mass, that will have to stop.
Show me clear sources quantifying the pain vs the emissions.
That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".
What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
It's hardly an existential threat to civilization or locally to societies it affects. It's a symptom of things going sough, sure.
It’s not that it did not happen before, civilisations rose up and disappeared several times in the past. It’s just that it is happening now, largely driven by climate issues.
What we are seeing now is regions becoming uninhabitable, crises sending waves of refugees, a dramatic shift towards nationalism in the West, which is terribly ill-equipped to solve global problem and is leading to a progressive crumbling of the international rules-based order. The US gave up on any pretense of sanity and went on a shooting match with Iran, throwing a wrench in the economies of a whole bunch of countries in Asia. Iran itself is in a terrible situation, with a lot of the country running dry. Trump of course is not a direct consequence of global warming, but it helps with the civilisation altering bits and adds to instability.
Europe is under its third heat wave of the year, all of them having been comparable to the historic ones from 1976 and 2003. This is also having a destabilising effect on several governments that are completely feckless, having spent 20 years trying to convince themselves that it was not happening, and was no big deal anyway.
These weather phenomena, along things like tropical storms in the Atlantic, are of course not new, but their frequency and magnitude is increased by global warming. They are currently costing billions and dealing with their consequences is not going to get cheaper.
> Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
I can. For example, the French Revolution was fueled by crop failures in the couple of years before due to particularly bad weather, related to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The revolutions of 1848 came after about 4 years of crop failures due to bad weather again.
The point is not that it never happened before. The Earth used to be much hotter (and also much colder). The environment used to not have humans around and it was fine. Revolutions and wars, and societal collapse are not new. Look at the late Bronze Age collapse if you want to have an idea of how bad it can realistically get. It’s not the end of the world, not even of humanity, but still a thoroughly unpleasant period to live in.
The point is that this is going to happen not because we rolled a bad dice, but because we’re bloody idiots and are doing it to ourselves.
I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of course, we can't know for sure what the consequences are untill we do the experiment, which in this case means potentially destroying large sections of the biosphere and living with increasingly destructive weather patterns. Surely that risk is worth at least legislating that hyperscalers need to spend some of their billions on solar panels?
Show me academic consensus showing that more than 1% of our species will go extinct within 100 years if we continue the emissions as now? I assume that's a reasonable characterisation of "mass extinction" and "on track for".
I was referring more to everything else. Corals, certain insects, polar bears, salamanders and so on. With some quick googling it appears that the "Bramble Cay Melomys" is the first species so far to be declared extinct because of climate change, but the number that seems to be thrown around is that an average of 18% of terrestrial life will be critically endangered by 2100 in a scenario with 2 degrees warming. I can't be bothered with figuring out what degree of academic consensus there is around that number, but I think it's reasonable to assume that there's at least some kind of consensus about "more than 1%".
We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its exactly the people in the third world that don't need climate change lecture because it is absolutely needed to increase their energy and emissions output to reduce deaths.
Lots of people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, India _already die_ not due to climate change but lack of productivity.
They definitely don't want holier than though westerners to tell them to reduce their emissions as if it doesn't come at any tradeoff whatsoever.
> Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices
False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
> We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its convenient to be vague about consequences. Then you can use the vagueness to oppose whatever you want. Don't like something someone's making? You can just say "but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is so you are not allowed to do that thing".
> False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000. The global average temperature anomaly has risen ~50% in the same period.
> but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is
We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse. For example, AMOC collapse would prevent much of Europe from growing enough food to sustain its population. Not an impossible problem but certainly not an easy one, especially in the context of a world already having to deal with moving fertile regions and mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East due to drought and extreme heat.
This doesn't count innovation due to technology. For instance, a lot of data centres in the past like 1990's, indirectly contributed in a lot of ways in reducing poverty and deaths - improving supply chain logistics, increasing general efficiency, helping in biological and pharma science. Stopping industrialisation disallows any progress in such fields. In the last 200 years we have made progress in science and tech allowing us to fight back with the environment.
> The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000.
That doesn't count income rising, acknowledging you specified inflation adjusted.
You can verify this yourself: try to ask whether the average person today can buy more food with their income or less food. The answer is unambiguously more food because Americans have much more disposable income through social programs, better wages and so on.
> We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse.
Source? Please show any source that tells us something like: this much emissions causes this much death in the future with relative confidence. And the tipping point must map to some meaningful tipping point where death rate increases by a big amount.
The only few sources I can see tell me that even if we don't reduce emissions, even if we stall scientific progress we still increase the annual death rate by 2%.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bf26af29f187c6f3a9f...
Actually a lot has changed -- the world passed peak oil and the benzine cars are practically done, while a lot of generation is now "green". It isn't enough to get it to C02 negative territory so far, but saying it's nothing is a bit counterfactual.
If you want to burn shit, you need to either not release CO2 somehow while doing it or suck it back from the the air somewhere and that second part isn't happening, because the emissions are mispriced.
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).
Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.
A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.
Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.
I understand that singling out datacenters specifically isn't really fair, but if they start accounting for 25% of the grid, then I have to pay for everybody's dancing JD Vance gifs even I don't look at them, at which point the line between communism and free market gets a bit blurry to me.
A single rubber duck factory in China emits more carbon emissions than all of France so I’m not sure why this number is even relevant.
Microsoft latest report shows 25% emissions raised due to AI data centers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870229
An alternative is what Google is theoretically aiming for: being carbon-free. But they've already started using language describing it as a moonshot or idealistic goal so seems likely they'll abandon that
https://sustainability.google/reports/247-carbon-free-energy...
In Europe this is covered by the emission trading system (EU ETS) and datacenters have to share the same shrinking emissions quota as other industries.
There are laws in the EU that will save the planet, like drinking from soggy paper straws instead of plastic and requiring caps stay attached in plastic bottles.
And just to make sure, at least in Poland they now charge you $0.10 if you buy anything plastic until you bring it back to the grocery store empty.
We are safe.