To feed your food preferences:
AI: ~560–800 Billion Liters Annual usage
Beef: ~4,387 Trillion Liters (for feed alone)
AI: Minimal land use
Beef: 44% of global habitable land
AI: ~20,400 tons CO2 (per large model)
Beef: ~14.5% of all global emissions
AI: Electronic waste, local heat islands
Beef: Methane, manure runoff, “dead zones”
A single quarter-pound beef burger requires between 40 and 70 gallons of surface/groundwater
A heavy AI user (50 queries/day for a year) consumes roughly 14 to 48 gallons of water annually
Beef driven industrial agriculture is the #1 driver of global deforestation. In the Amazon, cattle ranching is responsible for at least 75% of forest loss. This is causing ecological collapse.
All this to torture cows. Fucking stop it. Stop it NOW.
I think the point is that people play the environmental argument selectively when they could make a bigger impact by reducing their meat meat consumption or even quitting altogether, assuming their body can function well on a different diet.
If we’re talking about actual solutions, AI’s biggest issues come from who owns it, who controls its expansion and who suffers from the negative impacts. It’s capitalism rather than the tool itself.