“The line for emissions is going down, but the atmosphere responds to how much you pump into it, right? So if you kind of lazily decrease your emissions more slowly over time, you just have a worse atmospheric outcome for us.”
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David Roberts asked for numbers on what data centers are doing to power-sector emissions. Joshi says grids where emissions were falling are now falling more slowly, and answers the objection that emissions are still going down.
…itself accelerating fossil fuel exploration and things like that. But my primary focus is basically just on this building full of computers and how unique and weird and fascinating this trend is, this time that we're in now, where they're becoming, I would argue, quite a material threat to climate.
…just level of uncertainty about where this goes next is so wild that it's hard to pin anything down. But tell us your best estimate based on the sources that you trust. What's happening to data center, what's happening to power sector emissions right now? And what are the projections telling us?
Yeah. So we're seeing places where greenhouse gas emissions were falling, the rate at which it falls kind of decelerates a bit, right? Like it kind of puts a bit of a wedge in that lovely downwards trend, you know, that we were seeing in certain places. I've done a fair bit on Australia, for instance, where you have this really lovely excess of renewable resources, like, you know, sun and wind, but there has been a slowdown in renewable growth. And then data center growth kind of just sits on top of that and it accelerates these pre-existing things that were problems. And so to put it in some hard numbers, for instance, like Bloomberg New Energy Finance had an estimate, I think like a few weeks ago, a few months ago, where they estimated US power grid emissions could rise by 10% from what they were projected to be, right? If you sort of plug in data center emissions on grids. Bloomberg also did another estimate that was published, I think like a week ago, where they looked at the entire United States economy…
I was going to get to this later, but might as well talk about it now. Like, I mean, I have such mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I do not want us to come out of all this thinking that increased demand for electricity is bad for reasons that I know you understand. We want increased demand…