GW top charities

A quick OpenAI-o1 preview BOTEC for additional emissions from a sort of Leopold scenario ~2030, assuming energy is mostly provided by natural gas, since I was kinda curious. Not much time spent on this and took the results at face value. I (of course?) buy that emissions don't matter in short term, in a world where R&D is increasingly automated and scaled.

Phib: Say an additional 20% of US electricity was added to our power usage (e.g. for AI) over the next 6 years, and it was mostly natural gas. Also, that AI inference is used at an increasing rate, say 100Million H100s equivalent, increasing from today's level to 100M over the next 6 years, and it's more or less the same as today's energy breakdown, although with more natural gas over time.

What do the emissions from such a build out of natural gas look like?

[Reasoning available here: https://chatgpt.com/share/672ed183-7c3c-800d-ab0e-d08020d072c7]

**Answer:

The emissions from this build-out of natural gas over the next six years would be significant. Specifically:

• Total Additional Emissions Over Six Years: Approximately 1.136 billion metric tons of CO₂.
• Average Annual Emissions Increase: About 189 million metric tons of CO₂ per year.
• Percentage of Current U.S. Emissions: This represents an approximate 2.9% increase over the current annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

These emissions result from the increased natural gas usage required to meet the additional electricity demand—both from the general 20% increase in electricity consumption and the substantial growth in AI inference workloads powered by the equivalent of 100 million NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

Phib: Imagine there is a similar buildout in China, if not larger, how do the emissions from all of the above (within some confidence interval) place us environmentally within 2 years after 2030 of such a buildout and increase in emissions? Within 10 years? Considering a more or less constant rate of emissions thereafter for each.

Conclusion The combined emissions from the U.S. and China's buildouts would significantly impact the global carbon budget and environmental goals:

By 2032 (Two Years After 2030):

Additional Emissions: Approximately 2.44 billion metric tons of CO₂. Impact: Uses about 0.42% of the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5°C. By 2040 (Ten Years After 2030):

Additional Emissions: Approximately 12.21 billion metric tons of CO₂. Impact: Consumes about 2.1% of the carbon budget. Cumulative Impact by 2040:

Total Additional Emissions: Around 19.54 billion metric tons of CO₂. Percentage of Carbon Budget: Approximately 3.37%.

Environmental Implications:

Increased Difficulty in Meeting Climate Targets: The additional emissions make it more challenging to stay within the carbon budgets necessary to limit global warming to 1.5°C or even 2°C. Accelerated Climate Change Effects: Higher emissions could lead to more severe climate impacts, such as extreme weather events, sea-level rise, and ecosystem disruptions.

Final Note:

These estimates are subject to uncertainties due to potential changes in technology, policy, and economic factors. Proactive measures, such as investing in renewable energy and improving energy efficiency, could mitigate some of these emissions. However, without significant efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the environmental impact will be substantial and pose a serious challenge to global climate goals.

Final Phib note, perhaps inference energy costs may be far greater than assumed above, I don't imagine a GPT-5, GPT-6, that justify further investment, not also being adopted by a much larger population proportion (maybe 1 billion, 2 billion, instead of 100 million).

This could work in my version if such a review didn’t exist and you wanted to just say, “hey I think this’d be valuable for someone to do!” :)

I was thinking like open research questions, like this post and its links https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dRXugrXDwfcj8C2Pv/what-are-some-lists-of-open-questions-in-effective-altruism Although a number of these are probably outdated and I wouldn’t want to limit what could be added to such a tab. Generally, Questions people have that would be worth answering with regard to effective altruism.

So that if someone had some free time and/or wanted to practice answering such a question, you could go to this tab. Maybe on the forum home page. Maybe answers could then be linked to questions and potentially crossed off. Maybe eventually bounties to certain questions could be added if a person or org wants a / another take on a question.

Worth having some sort of running and contributable-to tab for open questions? Can also encourage people to flag open questions they see in posts.

Did the research experience help you be a better manager and operator from within research organizations?

I feel like getting an understanding by doing some research could be helpful and probably you could gain generalizable/transferable skills but I’m just speculating here.

Agreed interesting question, to add some flavor to the boosters, I think “national security” proponents is another way to categorize them.

https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2024/new-msu-study-fewer-people-want-to-stand-out-in-public

Could be a useful stat to cite in reference to facts about reality which could be used to support hypotheses that life isn’t actually getting better.

“The study looked at three dimensions of uniqueness: concern about other people’s reactions, desire to break the rules and the willingness to defend beliefs publicly. All three facets declined but the most dramatic were people being hesitant to defend their beliefs publicly (a 6.52% decline) and becoming more concerned with what people think about them (a 4.28% decline).”