Sure, I basically agree with everything you said. The thing is that even without data centers we’d be in this mess. I’m not trying to defend them, they definitely undo the little progress that was made. However, Trump would have undone the regulations with or without the data centers.

It’s just that it’s not only data centers that are fast tracking climate change. I mean… gestures broadly at everything basically everything is fast tracking climate change.

I guess you definitely are right in the sense that it’s one of the sources that’s among the easiest to get rid of.

Nice of you to side-track with current emissions (per capita even), and not cumulative historical emissions, which were actually mentioned.

Feel free to compare different countries yourself: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics (I’m not sure why ourworldindata doesn’t just put all of this on one page instead of splitting it up. It’s always a hassle to find the right one it even is on the same page, I just didn’t look close enough) The more interesting comparison might be high-income vs low-income countries.

To get back to the discussion: Yes, Europes share is not as huge as it used to be, and it’s getting lower, but what can be seen from @Tehdastehdas@piefed.social graph is that that’s less due to Europe behaving better and rather due to other countries polluting more. Not a good argument for saying “Europe is doing better now”

Don’t blame everything on the data centers. Everything else is doing its part in contributing to climate change.

Apart from that data centers, at the scale at which we seem them pop up now, are way too young to have a considerable effect on the current heat wave. Which doesn’t mean that they won’t in the future. Climate change is, after all, a decades long project

It’s Erik with a K, goddamnit!

What do you mean by

I’d been pretty skeptical that solar could ever cover its production costs

If you mean EROI, no one should be skeptical about that, unless you are constantly being fed misinformation. Solar panels quickly generate the energy required to produce them, in the worst cases it takes a few years.

And the good thing about solar panels is, they are incredibly durable, once they are put up they just keep on producing energy. Personally, I would argue that as long as not every roof is covered with them, recycling solar panels is bad. Why replace something that is still producing energy (and at that point for free, in EROI terms), when you could leave the old ones up and put the new panels on roofs that have none yet.

Luckily, companies are starting to see that as well, and refurbish solar panels instead of recycling them.

There’s a reason it goes reduce -> reuse -> recycle.