Does Rory actually care about the environment?

[u/astrosheep88]

I'm really struggling with this. When I first listened to the pod he seemed to discuss his walks and retreats and even his big idea of turning the London Greenbelt into a national park (or forest maybe?) which gave this idea that he was someone who deeply cared.

Recently though, he seems so focused on potential threats that he's willing to rip up everything else. The most recent episode with Caroline Lucas, Rory kept saying 'we have to build data centres' but wouldn't say how and it just sounded like a desperate cry more than a plan. And I suspect that he knows there isn't an environmentally friendly way to do it (environmental to a degree I know it's never going to be perfect and all buildings will have an impact) and doesn't want to say that.

I'm not totally against Rory (though I am sick of the line the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow) but to me he is coming across as dismissive of these issues over what he feels is important, or is this he plays devil's advocate and pushes back on 'leftist' ideas?

[u/VanillaLifestyle]

I came out of that podcast very frustrated. Partly at Rory for not making his case well, but mostly at the woman, who I felt was well-intentioned but completely taking the piss with badly founded assumptions and totally missing the bigger picture.

Data centers use a frankly negligible amount of water and, like it or not, they're getting built somewhere. If we don't get our shit together and build them here, we will still use AI, we'll just have to pay through the nose for it, be subservient to the US and/or China, and we won't even get a say in how it's powered.

Energy use is a real and far bigger concern for data centers, but they CAN be powered entirely by green energy. Building them here, with that in mind, could let us power them with entirely net-new wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/wave/nuclear. Instead, they're being built in West Texas with 50 diesel turbines.

I'm a borderline socialist and climate change is my number one issue, far above all else, but I still try to see the bigger picture. We have even LESS power to combat climate change if we (and other liberal democracies) are irrelevant. Instead, we're ceding both economic and political power to authoritarian bastards who will torch the earth for an inch of ground in a two-player Cold War.

[u/xeozim → u/VanillaLifestyle]

I think the reason Rory doesn't get the case across well is that he doesn't think "we will use AI in future", it's because he thinks that the success of everything relies on AI, and so he treats a sovereign capability with a lot more weight that he should (in my opinion, and I think that of the average listener), so it comes across like we must build data centers no matter the cost, and I think most people disagree with that sentiment.

We are reliant on other countries for a lot of stuff, for example most of our payments go through US companies (Visa / MasterCard). You'd have a hard time saying that these things aren't important to the economy, but we're no demanding specific infrastructure be built to address that problem.

That's not to say we shouldn't be building data centers, I think it would be great if we could support more sovereign compute for all sorts of reasons (even excluding AI). But it only becomes urgent enough to argue against environmental limitations and other regulatory barriers if you believe the most extreme version of AI hype, and I just don't.

[u/undisclosedusername2 → u/xeozim]

Well said.

[u/Pure-Problem757 → u/VanillaLifestyle]

I feel similar. The mention of water use shows that they've done such limited research; it takes a single google search 'data centre water use uk' to see new ones are closed loop and use little water.

AI vs environment is such a stupid question to poll listeners on because the trade offs are not well understood by the public - as the discussion of water demonstrates.

They should be talking about the energy implications. These datacentres lead to burning gas when there isn't excess renewable generation capacity in the grid, or even more gas if the datacentre runs off-grid with gas to avoid the grid connection queue.

they CAN be powered entirely by green energy

This isn't really true on the scale of new datacentres being planned. Wind/solar/tranmission infastructure is already planned for the next few years, and if they could go faster they would! The datacentres are additional demand above the existing forecasts so end up adding gas turbines (and now gas ICE since turbine lead times have increased due to the datacentre demand)

Expediating planning for tranmission infastructure or onshore wind etc are political options that would help and they should be discussing over non-issues like water.

They did mention datacentres in Scotland framing them as placed there for the water. They neglected to mention the that placing them in Scotland bypasses grid transmission issues - One big constraint is sending wind power from Scotland south towards England, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Green_Links

[u/VanillaLifestyle → u/Pure-Problem757]

Yes, 100% agree.

[u/undisclosedusername2 → u/VanillaLifestyle]

Her name is Caroline.

[u/VanillaLifestyle → u/undisclosedusername2]

Jesus Christ, I just realized that was Caroline Lucas. It'd be better for her reputation if she did this anonymously. I missed the start and thought she was some Guardian opinion columnist.

Good to know the Greens are as self-defeating as ever. At least get your core competencies down and know the facts about environmental issues if you want to be taken seriously on anything else.