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Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong

Edit: Good responses from everyone, my point in asking this was completely hypothetical, ignoring how hard it would be to implement a restriction. My own thoughts are that requiring the use of renewable energy for high electricity products could help spur the demand for it as now it's a requirement. Of course companies would fight back, they want money

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Generally speaking, pollution etc. is what economists call "external cost". It should be penalized in some way, and the usual tool is taxation. It's not just AI and Crypto that should pay for non-green energy, but everyone. It's massively simpler that way too, and massively simpler = harder to circumvent and manipulate.

Simplicity's bad side in this is that it's difficult to slap a "correct price" on pollution. I.e. difficult to calculate how much actual damage they're causing.

In actual world, thanks to rampant corporatism and other forms of fuckery, what we're actually doing is subsidizing these fuels, which is of course completely ass-backwards. Just removing the subsidies would already help a lot, but actually penalizing those energy forms even just a little would be huge.