[radicalbyte]

I've read the article and I kind of agree with some of the things he's saying. It's more than just AI though. Energy is the big problem and the big problem there is that we're just not ramping up renewables quickly enough. Why? Corruption of course. We had a big leaded 15-20 years ago but the German car manufactorers and British/Dutch oil companies applied a huge amount of political pressure, aided by American interests, which not just slowed the transition but also helped strangle our solar/wind industry. It's not a lost cause though, at EU level they could absolutely make it happen.

[chadgpt3]

When you take a train ride through Germany you see solar fields and wind farms everywhere. How much will be enough?

[sajithdilshan]

Renewable energy is unreliable without a steady storage capacity and EU would still rely on raw materials for battery production on other countries. Further, regardless of the energy source, what is vital for AI or any other industry is a steady, reliable power source which cannot be provided only through renewables in EU, not only because lack of storage, but also unfavourable geography.

[radicalbyte]

That's only true at the micro level; at the macro level it is surprisingly stable over the EU zone + UK + Norway. There are capacity and interconnect issues but they're small fry. We have a huge amount of capacity for wind and considerable for solar, we just need to get using more of it.

We have one of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals in the world in the EU. Where we suffer is in lack of refining capacity. The US are in a similar situation.

[sajithdilshan]

That is not true. Germany shutting down their atomic power plants had a rippling effect on the energy market in whole EU because they thought renewables would be enough to power the German industries. It was criticised by even the Sweden's Minister for Energy (Ebba Busch).

Right now Germany is being de-industrialised because it's far expensive for the industries to produce goods there compared to other EU countries and those companies are moving out. That's the price Germany is paying right now for betting on renewables without any investment on infrastructure or a proper migration plan and blind political guidance.

Even the EU has rare earth minerals, do you really thing the climate activists, nature conservation activists and all other far lefties would actually allow mining those minerals in EU?

[radicalbyte]

Germany shut down their atomic power plants and replaced them with natural gas. They even fiddled the EU environmental rules such that natural gas was considered "part of the green transition". That all back-fired when Russia - the source of that natural gas - attempted to use it as leverage to take Ukraine.

We were screaming at them at the time that it was a very very dumb idea to close their nuclear power and against natural gas. As always we were right.

Climate activits? We've been sending riot police and disappearing them for 5 years now whilst the bands of knife carrying racists thugs, funded by America, roam around our streets causing all hell.

[radicalbyte]

I do agree about China being way ahead and way smarter here, I should add. They've made America, Europe, Japan, India, Russia look really stupid. I've admired their strategic long term thinking for as long as I've been aware of it (~25 years now, they have a long history and deep rich culture and this is part of it).