> For instance, the emission footprint of a US resident is approximately 15 metric tons CO2e per year22, which translates to roughly 1.7 kg CO2e per hour
Those 15,000kg of CO2e are emitted regardless of that that person does.
The article also makes assumptions about laptops that are false.
>Assuming an average power consumption of 75 W for a typical laptop computer.
Laptops draw closer to 10W than 75W, (peak power is closer to 75W but almost not laptops can dissipate 75W continually).
The article is clearly written by someone with an axe to grind, not someone who is interested in understanding the cost of LLM's/AI/etc.
> And when you have the opportunity to use human labour or AI, AI is almost certainly the greener option as well. For instance, the carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are far lower for AI than for humans:
Do you plan on killing that person to stop their emissions?
If you don't use the AI program the emissions don't happen, if you don't hire a person for a job, they still use the carbon resources.
So the comparison isn't 1000kg Co2 for a human vs 1kg Co2 for an LLM.
It's 1000kg Co2 for a human vs 1001kg Co2 for an LLM.
The need to electrify the economy is why nuclear is so bad, it simply can't compete on cost even.
This article is about a power plant that cost £46Billion and nameplate of 3260 MW
Assuming 100% load factor for the plant (looks like 70-80% is more common but I'll be generous) that's 28,557,600MWh per year. Or a cost of £1610 per MWh per year.
Taking just one of the latest wind farm in UK South Kyle Wind Farm, Cost £38Million with a nameplate of 240MW.
Assuming 10% load factor (30% is common but I'll be pessimistic for this case).
That's 210,240MWh per year,(2400.1 24 * 365) that's £180 per MWh per year,
(Life span differences of wind(30 year expected) vs nuclear(40-60) could increase the cost of the wind by up to double if you took the worst case but I've already given a 3x disadvantage on load factor)
Even with the deck stacked in nuclear's favour it's 10x more expensive than wind, you will simply never migrate a factory using thermal gas with the cost of electricity made by nuclear.
Edit: also Flamanville 3 in france costs are better but still so much worse than wind, 13billion Euro(~11Billion GBP) for 1600MW nameplate, comes out for 713gbp per MWh per year, still 3x worse than wind.
One thing I found out recently found out about nuclear that really shuts down home "great" it is as a fix for climate change is how limited fuel is for it.
Some numbers
Nuclear currently uses about 60,000 tonnes per year of uranium [1]
Nuclear is about 10% of electricity, 4% of energy as a whole [2]
There is about 8,000,000 tonnes of uranium reserves world wide [3]
For a 100% of current electricity demand by nuclear that's 13 years of fuel,
For 100% of energy (e.g. gas heaters replaced by electric powered by nuclear) that's 5 years of fuel.
The old stuff Human created fakes have always drawn criticism but the amount and distribution was so limited that it was easy for people not directly affected to ignore or not know about it.
Now the new Generated stuff is to prevalent and easy to produce it's too hard to ignore.
Being against Carbon Capture and geo-engineering is just following the science.
Carbon capture has constantly been shown to just not work at any scale. and geo-engineering causes so many extra problems and will absolutely lead to termination shock at some point.
I agree, we should limit flight to exclusively across large oceans. And replace flights over land with more practical low carbon options like high speed trains.
That's not true. Heat pumps are cheaper to run than gas heating, I removed my old single room gas heater for a ducted split system total cost reduction was 30% even before Russian invasion caused gas prices to spike. And house is much warmer.
Gas boilers generally produce much hotter water, so the radiators they use tend to be small.
Heat pumps gain more efficiency if you can reduce the output temperature. So running a heat pump at max efficiency through radiators designed for a gas system, won't put out as much heat into the room.
So you have two options, increase the size of the radiators or increase the insulation.
It's better to increase the insulation as you gain the benefit of both warmer room and less energy required to heat a room.
If the system your building is "mathematically impossible" to explain in a way that would be expected of every other system. Maybe you shouldn't be building that system.
Everything is political, FOSS is political, GitHub is also political.
When people say "We're not political", or "That's not political". What they're actually saying is that it's within my own politics.