It's a rich world perspective to buy new cars every couple years, including electric cars which massively frontload the emissions borne of those cars, or to go home every night and stream 1080p video into your living room for hours on end while serving up gigs of photos and video to your phone through Instagram and TikTok. Datacenters are something like 20% of all energy consumption.
In many parts of the world, even places you've heard of, people walk or bike everywhere they need to go and spend their free time sitting around chatting with neighbors.
No one's arguing to delete fossil fuels, but it makes sense to minimize usage to freight and public transit.
> Datacenters are something like 20% of all energy consumption.
Do you have a source for that? It didn't sound right and my quick Googling suggests that it's off by around a factor of 20 or more. (Some put datacenters as low as 1% of total electricity consumption, which is a subset of all energy consumption.)
It was admittedly hearsay. My research says it's about 2% of energy use in the US and 1% of electricity use worldwide with remarkable constancy in electricity demands due to storage and computing efficiency gains. Thanks for the reality check.
In many parts of the world, even places you've heard of, people walk or bike everywhere they need to go and spend their free time sitting around chatting with neighbors.
No one's arguing to delete fossil fuels, but it makes sense to minimize usage to freight and public transit.