The only way to control people's behavior is to change the real world cost. Want to decrease consumption of high resource and CO2 foods? Stop externalizing their cost. Want to decrease people's AI usage? Stop externalizing costs. Want to encourage people to switch to lower CO2 transport? Stop externalizing costs. Want to encourage upcycling and decrease waste? Stop externalizing costs. Want companies in any business to decrease their ecological impact? Stop externalizing costs. If we actually charged what things cost then any market would naturally correct itself. If we just globally charged what things actually cost then that would about solve the situation almost overnight.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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If we actually charged what things cost then any market would naturally correct itself.
If we can change what things cost then it demonstrates the market isn't natural. The problem we're running into here is that the market and politics are intertwined, so the market can set the prices by lobbying the government to change what things cost.
So you have to defeat the market first before we can actually set prices to include the real costs of carbon emissions.
The cost would ideally just be the actual or true cost including the environmental impact as best as that can be calculated. You are right though that wealth and power are not indistinct and corporations use their wealth to increase the externalization of costs of their services or products to maximize their immediate profits. The intention of a government is to police the market, not the other way around. Our problem with humanity committing a slow suicide is that it's reversed.
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I've seen a ton of anti-AI articles that were written using AI.
They'll 'write' anything that gets clicks, regardless of the subject.
I even saw anti-AI video essays on YouTube likely made mostly by AI.
dude, they were on a flight, you know they're not serious from the get go
https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/life-after-oil/2016/02/11/how-far-can-we-get-without-flying
Hour for hour, there’s no better way to warm the planet than to fly in a plane.
You can’t collect per diem or get credit card points from a virtual conference though. Think of their bank accounts!
Soon you can cripple the US by knocking chatgpt off of the internet.
I am just waiting for Claude code to go down at work to see the aftermath. Imagine if it was out for a week? People would probably wait rather than writing code by hand again haha. I think it would be so funny to see everyone freak out.
Maybe they would let us code by hand again
I've been reading about claude agents being fed back into themselves like a recursion. The programmers say they start losing the ability to understand what it is doing after a while. Imagine having that code base dumped on you.
Welcome to the platform for real humans instead of clankers
On a plane? Hmmm
We still meet for climate change conferences. Like, no one figured out zoom conferences and work from home.
I wonder what responses I get for saying this, but nowadays both (as in zoom conference vs in person conference) is possible and both has upsides and downsides.
Online conferences are great to just listen to a specific talk, but other than that in person conferences are just a nicer experience. You can more freely just chat with other scientists, often there is a social evening where you randomly meet people you may not have thought about contacting before.
Now, should you travel around the globe every year several times just for that? Probably not. But in some fields there is one big conference every other year and it hugely benefits you as a scientist to attend these. Sometimes that means travelling from Europe to Oceania.
I see some people already taking issue with it in the comments, but I have also been to conferences that helped create partnerships that would not have happened otherwise. I'm not trying to suggest it's worth the emissions or anything, but I agree that being physically present is more conducive to making those connections.
I think a helpful thing would be if people stopped sending people that are just doing it to check it off a list and be done with it. The idea that attending a conference in and of itself is some kind of development is wrong, and people should only go if they're actually interested in participating in the exchange of ideas.
People doing presentations almost invariably have a façade on and what they're saying is either carefully vetted to avoid giving offense and/or is done with the purpose of projecting a very specific impression and/or generating a very specific response.
When it comes to making up your mind about somebody and their ideas, watching a presentation at a conference it's just slightly better than watching a politican on TV, which is about the most staged, carefully managed image of a person you can get.
IMHO, even as difficult as it is for introverts, the best way to discover good people with open minds and interesting ideas is when casually chatting with other equally anonymous attendees and that's not something possible via video-conference.
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And we still have trains and boats
Does the company you're employed at always happily give you how many extra days you need to take a boat or to ride a train instead of taking a plane? Lucky you, I can promise you that's not the case everywhere.
Like sure, you could insist on taking the cleanest transportation method available but that's definitely putting yourself on the chopping block and while starving to death due to not having income definitely is very climate friendly overall (less humans = less negative impact on climate after all) I really hope you can see yourself why this isn't actually a proper solution. Unless you want to see humanity go extinct but in that case might as well also continue the way we have so far.
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Oh that could be me... I work at a major organization that directly interacts at the highest levels of climate policymaking. You know what I recently learned from our comms team? Policymakers are asking AI about the options in front of them. So they advised us to feed as much data as we can into these AIs, so that when policymakers ask AI about their options, they will not only get the lobbyist answer. What a world to live in.
So they advised us to feed as much data as we can into these AIs, so that when policymakers ask AI about their options, they will not only get the lobbyist answer.
That's not how AI works though. You can't feed data into an AI in a way that affects the answers other people get. It's not learning anything in real-time like that.
If you want to "feed data" into an AI system all you can really do is publish that data publicly and wait for it to be scraped up into their training data.
Edit: I'll admit that I overlooked the fact they do add conversations to training data but a single user is going to be weighted VERY low. Especially if their data looks like an outlier.
Seems pretty unlikely to me that you could really influence the model in a meaningful way like that.
Better off focusing on public/authoritative data that will get weighted a lot heavier.
That is how AI works.
Most AI... Gosh, I'm not sure what to call it here, models, agents, tools? Whatever, most AI things nowadays don't just rely on their dataset, they can also make queries out to the web. So, yes, making sure AI tools can easily get answers from your website is a real thing companies need to be aware of. Because the reality we live in now is that most people's search engines have an AI Summary at the top, and that's all most people are going to look at. Most people were already stopping at the first search result prior to this.
It has a term I think? AIO maybe? I don't remember. Basically like SEO but for AI.
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You found a greenwasher. There's a lot of them.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
It is gross that someone who believes in sustainability would use AI for a thing IRL specifically dedicated for sustainability. People really shouldn't be using AI at all, but this is the worst version of it.
Cognitive dissonance, or grifters just grifting
Its a good reminder that capitalism and its infinite urgency and extraction ideology is fueling the climate crisis and AI is just the latest and worst iteration of it.
Needing to fly because our lives are so squshed by that same capitallism that makes taking a bus or train impractical is yet another symptom
Soon LLM tools will become a luxury for the more affluent like flying as prices adjust up to correct for the absurd costs
God forbid we build more high speed rail.
I've talked about this a lot, but it pisses me off so much that so many small towns where I live in Georgia (and maybe most states in the US) have little decommissioned train stops. But the train lines are still used. My parents live in a town with one. I live in a town with one. They're both within walking distance. In a better world I'd be able to catch a train to go see them without driving.
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Reddit's LLM powered filter (I am guessing Gemini) is interesting. I jokingly said to constantly bump your car into some else's car just hard enough to leave a mark but not create serious damage. The trigger may have been my use of the phrase "love tap" as I was instantly dinged a 3 day "ban" for advocating physical violence against another human being.
Meanwhile with another service I posted a quote from a 19th century historical figure I hadn't know was a socialist and mysteriously the quote disappeared after I clicked submit. I freely admit my grasp of "good" grammar and English may not be that secure, but I am confident the text was there, and then suddenly it was gone.
The issue here is using a llm to write protentialy really important documentation that should really be backed by real science.
The issue is not the obvious hypocrisy.
This is a variation on the “you said, on an iphone line” ai is everywhere people will use it and can still meaningfully criticize wasting tremendous amount of energy.
How many of y'all do not eat meat, do not shop online, only consume content from ethical non corporate sources?
The problem here is the blind confidence people have in these shallow text machines.
Except unlike smartphones that are so ubiquitous and essential for life today, using chatbots is entirely elective and unnecessary.
Meat is an important source of essential nutrition and eschewing it is a luxury to many people in the world. Online shopping, in this day and age, is very frequently the only way to acquire certain goods we need. It is practically impossible to stay informed as to the state of the world without reading news from corporate sources.
There is nothing essential or unavoidable about ChatGPT. On the contrary, they and their audience would be much better served by not using it.
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I looked up the company, and turns out this program might be part of a Keynote Livestream that is featuring the Mayor of San Fransisco lol.
What is the name of the company?
Trellis? I guess they used to be called GreenBiz. I just looked it up and this is the event: https://trellis.net/events/trellis-impact/
On a plane.
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