The Carbon Footprint Sham ⇥ mashable.com

Thinking about the energy “footprint” of artificial intelligence products makes it a good time to re-link to Mark Kaufman’s excellent 2020 Mashable article in which he explores the idea of a carbon footprint:

The genius of the “carbon footprint” is that it gives us something to ostensibly do about the climate problem. No ordinary person can slash 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. But we can toss a plastic bottle into a recycling bin, carpool to work, or eat fewer cheeseburgers. “Psychologically we’re not built for big global transformations,” said John Cook, a cognitive scientist at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. “It’s hard to wrap our head around it.”

Ogilvy & Mather, the marketers hired by British Petroleum, wove the overwhelming challenges inherent in transforming the dominant global energy system with manipulative tactics that made something intangible (carbon dioxide and methane — both potent greenhouse gases — are invisible), tangible. A footprint. Your footprint.

The framing of most of the A.I. articles I have seen thankfully shies away from ascribing individual blame; instead, they point to systemic flaws. This is preferable, but it still does little at the scale of electricity generation worldwide.