Yes, obviously AI is emitting way too much. It shouldn’t even be producing 0.2% of global emissions, let alone 2%. My main grievance is that no one ever talks about improving industrial and agricultural processes even though they produce around 29% of emissions and 20% of emissions respectively.
Well in the agricultural sense the only thing we can do is to make more people vegetarian (not really happening)/and make more affordable plant based milk. The latter one is actually in here already! I’ve seen plant based milks not that much more expensive than a cow’s milk in Hungary.
While switching to plant based food is an obvious course of action which would have drastic benefits, several other methods exist by which agricultural emissions. These include:
Now I’m picturing tractors with the power arms that you see on Vancouver buses. Putting up wires over the fields in the right pattern would be a huge project, though. Oof.
still very likely a worthwhile investment. It would also bring cost reductions with a bunch of automations such scaffolding could bring.
Somehow I doubt it. I’d actually expect the capital costs of designing and install the wires to make it unfeasible. Maybe if you had grants for the construction aspect…hmm…
A more likely path seems like electric tractors, maybe with swappable batteries. Really, though, I think I’d need to hear from actual farmers rather than trying to brainstorm in their behalf.
You don’t necessarily need people to go full vegetarian. Just eating less meat is a much easier sell. If 2 people eat 1/2 as much meat as they otherwise would, that’s just as good as 1 person going full vegetarian.
The type of meat also matters. Beef is much higher in greenhouse gas emissions than any other type of meat. So if you just switch beef for, say, chicken or pork, you’re already doing a lot better.
This is me. I haven’t completely cut out meat, but I’m down to eating it maybe once or twice a week. Breakfast is usually peanut butter toast, lunch is usually leftovers, so that leaves dinner planning.
A lot of this came from a health issue early last year. I shifted my diet significantly and ended up loving some of the veg recipes!