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AI boom has caused same CO2 emissions in 2025 as New York City, report claims
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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So that's actually not that much? After everybody was screaming that AI is boiling the world, 8% of global aviation emissions is kind of low. And you might hate AI, but it is really more useful than Katie from Sales getting skin cancer on a beach in Thailand or that dude getting drunk on Mallorca or whatever those billionaires are doing in their private jets
Remember they have a lot of data centres planned. This is just the start. 8% of aviation emissions is huge. We should be shrinking that number ASAP, not growing it.
This and also the models are growing and, assuming it will be achieved, AGI will require even more energy.
They won’t achieve it and they’re going to sunk cost the global economy into a nosedive.
Source: trust me bro
The same source the AI techbros are using
I hate both the AI bubble (not the science behind it) and private jets and billionaires if that makes you feel better.
Also, global aviation serves an extremely useful function. Not sure that compares to fancy code autocomplete and media generation that either invalidates digital evidence in legal courts or looks like an insult to life itself.
Isn't it both? There are great use cases for global aviation (like visiting your family back home) and bad use cases (like sex tourism in a third world country). There are also great things you can do with AI and bad things.
Global aviation is generally more efficient than traveling by car is it not? Not accounting for the use of private planes.
Yes, I will concede to that. Supposedly LLMs help a lot in certain scientific research domains replacing tedious manual work.
The thing is, the prevalence of good vs bad scenarios are inversed between GenAI and aviation I would argue. Due to lack of legal regulation we see insane amounts of funding being given for the most greedy nefarious purposes, like the elimination of the working class or artists, privacy violations for the sake of control and literally weapons out of dystopian scifi.
It's really not the same.
A large chunk of air transport is also freight. And business. And regular domestic travel for people going from A to B, travel that doesn't include holidays for Kate or that drunk dude in Mallorca.
And when you look at those uses, AI is still running a pretty distant second place.
8% of total global aviation emissions doesn't put it in second place. It's not even in the top 100. I don't think it ever will be... Because building huge data centers takes years and by the time there's enough data centers to make a huge dent, the previous AI data centers will have been used to make fusion power a reality.
Today's fusion reactor designs were all made thanks to AI. The kind running in big data centers.
It takes a lot of computing power to simulate fusion reactor designs!
As far as I can understand, that number refers to current electricity usage. So the actual energy cost is significantly higher and it's currently growing at a rapid pace.
Also what's with the whataboutism? Aviation emissions are a huge problem. We don't use it as a bar for whether something is significant or not.
Yep.
There's tons of great reasons to hate AI. Tech Bros. Spam in every nook and cranny.
...But the power/water use has always been overblown. US tech is particularly sloppy about it, setting up generators and evaporators in cities, running huge training runs without proper optimization, but thats FOMO, impatience, and Tech Bro Evangelism more than a fundamental characteristic. It doesn't have to be that way, and I'd wager they can't sustain it long.