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.
Thank you, that’s super fascinating. The way that people who work in the industry talk about animals is very unsettling, they have really convinced themselves that animals can’t feel the pain they inflict on them. So I had assumed that they had completely reduced animals to objects in their mind. Knowing that ptsd is common is somewhat relieving because it means that fully objectifying living beings cannot happen without consequences.