[Shakahs]

Grok are the first models I am boycotting on purely environmental grounds. They built their datacenter without sufficient local power supply and have been illegally powering it with unpermitted gas turbine generators until that capacity gets built, to the significant detriment of the local population.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-gas...

[njovin]

Imagine needing electricity and government contracts so much that you spend $250M to get somebody elected president, and the second thing your guy does in office is cancel all of the projects that could provide you with more electricity.

[qingcharles]

And then he posts about it literally every day moaning about the lack of power, lack of solar, etc. All the things he bitches and moans about are things he caused by helping elect the orange fella.

[mrcwinn]

By his own words, Elon is not an environmentalist and doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate. His concern is with the futility of relying on a non-renewable resource. He believes there is significantly more lithium than there is oil, I guess.

In the end, incentives are all that matter. Do hotels care deeply about the environment, or are they interested in saving in energy and labor costs as your towel is cleaned? Does it matter? Does moralizing really get us anywhere if our ends are the same?

[IrishTechie]

I know it’s in vogue to dump on Elon these days, and with good reason, but do I not recall him on a number of occasions quite emotionally describing our continued CO2 emissions as the dumbest experiment in human history?

[Havoc]

>doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate

Is it that or a belief that we can outrun the problem? i.e. mix of accelerationism and making humanity multi planetary

[behnamoh]

oh the irony... EV company CEO doesn't care about env...

[cameronh90]

I care enormously about protecting the environment and stopping climate change, but I'm not an environmentalist.

Environmentalists usually care about the environment for its own sake, but my concern is our own survival. Similarly, I don't intrinsically care about plastic in the ocean, but our history of harming ourselves with waste we think is harmless would justify applying the precautionary principle there too.

As far as Musk goes, it's hard to track what he actually believes versus what he has said to troll, kowtow to Trump or "own the libs", but he definitely believes in anthropogenic climate change and he has been consistent on that. He seems to sometimes doubt the predictions of how quick it will occur and, most of all, how quickly it will impact us.

I think there probably is a popular tendency to overstate the predictive value of certain forecasts by simply grouping all climate science together. In reality, the forecasts have tended to be extremely accurate for the first order high level effects (i.e. X added carbon leads to Y temperature increase), but downstream of that the picture becomes more mixed. Particularly poor have been predictions of tipping points, or anything that depends on how humans will be affected by, or react to, changes in the environment.

[hkt]

Not everyone is a nihilist.

[cameldrv]

Yes, Elon is probably playing fast and loose with the rules, but his 150MW of turbines are right next to the TVA's 1100MW of turbines and a steel mill. Not surprising given that it's a heavy industrial area, it's about 4 miles from any significant number of houses. There are plenty of good reasons to hate on Elon, but IMO this ain't it.

[ceejayoz]

“We dumped this nuclear waste next to the existing storage site! Totally cool, right?”

[rikafurude21]

If thats the yard stick you should boycott everything coming out of china, which is pretty much everything, since they are one of the largest polluters globally.

[zzzoom]

Not even close

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

[jamespo]

if there's a reasonable alternative why not, there are plenty of reasonable alternative coding models

[topaz0]

Better late than never I suppose.

[nonethewiser]

It would be nice if they could get more power online faster.

[Tadpole9181]

Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.

[declan_roberts]

Elon needs to do the right thing and play by the rules of other data centers: green wash their energy with a fake green energy company /s

The only player doing the right thing here is probably Microsoft which is retrofitting an entire nuclear energy plant.

Everybody else is faking it to make you feel better. Elon just is skipping the faking it part.

[topaz0]

The only players doing the right thing are the ones that are staying out of LLMs entirely.

[nebezb]

How would you know that?

[moshun]

Technology does not exist separately from society and culture, and in the last few decades has arguably made a lot of the world and society worse. I’m all for using the biggest lever I have to address harmful behaviors from corporations. Withhold your wallet, stay off their platforms and make your reasons known.

I’m not sure what about that you’re upset with.

[asah]

There are nicer ways to say this.

[a1371]

Hacker News Guidelines are worth a read:

## In Comments

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic"

[curvaturearth]

Go touch some grass