193
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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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.
Not really:
So you might be able to create a scenario where driving around in your american pickup alone produces more CO2 per km than sitting in a long-distance flight. But: If you're not sitting alone in your car and you're driving something reasonable, that flips.
And flying will cover longer distances. Yes, there are a lot of people driving to spain in the summer from the netherlands, but nobody is driving from Europe to Thailand or from New York to Bali or from London to Sidney. Flying is faster and you will cover more km. And that means that even if flying would be as efficient per km than a car, it will always be worse
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.