this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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I heard this before:
I am 100% sure big oil is heavily invested in pushing AI data centers.
Feels more like the fossil fuel industry would be quite happy with people pointing fingers at AI for the more fundamental problem they are causing.
They are the same. AI companies are using excess energy powered by fossil fuels for no reason at all. We don't need it. If they were using renewable energy then they would be taking renewable energy from projects that are much more important for our daily survival.
All energy consumed by AI is energy we could have spend for something actual useful. That they are using fossil fuels just underlines what a mountain of "fuck you" to humanity the entire AI project is. It exists solely to provide more billions for billionaires and no other reason.
Exactly ... the problem with AI is that it's wasting energy.
Then there is another problem, which is that a lot of our energy comes from sources that cause pollution.
The wasting of energy would not be that significant of a problem if enough clean energy was available. They are not the same. Just related.
Same is true for meat. Meat is to nutrition what AI is to intelligence. An extremely wasteful, ultimately unnecessary version with better alternatives.
The main difference for all the complainers is of course that they already don't use AI. Not using meat would, in contrast, require actual effort beyond moaning and bitching.
If your morals depend on whether it requires personal effort, you're not moral, you're a hypocrite.
Case in point: Alberta. As a landlocked province, they have been struggling to get oil and gas to markets, being limited by the pipelines other provinces or the US is willing to build. Now, the vast, vast majority of the planned ai datacentres in Canada are in Alberta, with insane sweetheart deals from government.
They found a way to get paid to burn gas within their borders and are going whole hog.