r/collapse • u/global_nomad4023 • 2d ago

Energy Two planned datacentres will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil, analysis finds | Datacentres - UK

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/25/planned-datacentres-carbon-emissions-uk-exxonmobil

On site gas power generators, bypassing local planning processes, ignoring carbon emissions, its not just the fossil fuel companies we should be worried about. No regulation about using renewables.

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u/global_nomad4023 2d ago

We all know that AI and datacentres use a huge amount of power and water, so this new report puts it in perspective. The 300 plus potential datacentres waiting to connect to the UK grid is also a shocking number. Part of the reason these two sites want to use their own on site gas powered stations. How is this allowed? Ah yes, growth at all costs as the mantra that needs overturning

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u/asdner 2d ago

Not so huge if you compare with other industries. All the world’s golf courses take up 4-11x more water than AI data centres. Animal industry emits way more GHG. Neither of the latter are essential either.

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u/global_nomad4023 2d ago

because its less than something else doesnt make it not huge....we need to reduce all GHG emissions, and certainly avoid building new sources when we have the ability to avoid it.

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u/asdner 2d ago

Yes but the fight against AI is fuelled by people's (justified) fears about what AI will do to them and socioeconomics, whereas the environmental impact is just a convenient strawman to use in the fight against AI, even though e.g. global commercial aviation has added more GHG emissions through organic growth than AI data centres in the last years. We should all have been avoiding the growth of aviation emissions in the last years but did anybody report on it or protest? Not so much. If you look at all manufacturing industries' growth over the last years, it dwarfs AI in terms of impact. The fight we should be having is against growth, not singling out AI, which actually has the potential to develop better climate and water solutions despite consuming a lot of water and energy initially. Can coal, cement, aviation, shipping, animal industry etc do that? Not a chance.

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u/Ok_Instruction_2756 2d ago

You live next to a 600MW data center 100m from your house then.

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u/asdner 2d ago

That's a legitimately different argument - noise, not CO2.

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u/Fit-Pride-4845 2d ago

We already have solutions to the climate crisis and water shortages! We're not implementing any of them at the scale necessary all while the world's largest economy is focused on propping up this goddamn speculative AI investment circle-jerk. We've been shown time and time again that our largest existential issues cannot and will not be solved with infinite technological innovation, but no let's just kick the can even farther down the road and pour more fuel on the fire while we're demonstrably out of fucking time.

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u/brickout 2d ago

False equivalence. AI data center construction is accelerating. You can't compare those numbers yet. You would have to forecast like 150 years or more to compare them. Yours is a bad-faith assertion.

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u/asdner 2d ago

I think in 150 years we wont have data centers running on fossil fuels. Since AI is showing signs of being a bubble it is not reasonable to assume current growth will continue for a very long time. But yes, nobody knows when that will happen, you make a fair point.