Why does it matter whether e.g. a hospital runs on renewable energy or not? Why is "industry" good but "data centers" are bad?
If some companies care enough about their image to pay extra to buy green energy, that's good! It makes that production more profitable, and encourages more such production to be built faster. Why are you trying to disincentivize that with "greenwashing" slurs?
Because the global goal of all that is the CO2 emissions that we emit __today__.
I'm perfectly fine that we start big plans to build many new nuclear and renewable plants, but __today__ we need to emit less CO2, now. CO2 just add up in the atmosphere and don't degrade in the time we have.
SO, in the quota we need to respect, I prefer to ensure that the today capacity we have of "clean energy" are used for a proper usage better than allocating the current clean, and upcoming clean ones to some Google servers that are used to generate AI images for fun.
If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon.
> prefer to ensure that the today capacity we have of "clean energy" are used for a proper usage better than allocating the current clean, and upcoming clean ones to some Google servers that are used to generate AI images for fun
You’re proposing capping economic growth to save the planet. Admirable. But with tremendous, almost guaranteed, capacity for backlash.
Empirically, growing economies green faster because while we should treat climate change as an existential crisis, we don’t, we treat it as a luxury.
> If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon
The house isn’t on fire. It’s settling wrong. It won’t burn us in minutes but bury us in decades. The analogy is in quitting your job to start repairs even though you don’t have the cash on hand to finish them.
Oh, so your objection isn't to them buying green energy, it's to them buying electricity at all?
Google and Microsoft are clearly more effective users of energy than many other commercial users, i.e. creating more value per watt spent. In a situation where you're going to snap your fingers and killing companies or entire industries by refusing to sell them electricity, you don't want to go for the efficient energy users. You want to go after the ones where the energy is adding the least marginal value.
If some companies care enough about their image to pay extra to buy green energy, that's good! It makes that production more profitable, and encourages more such production to be built faster. Why are you trying to disincentivize that with "greenwashing" slurs?