I wonder, if you priced out replacing every single car in the USA with an electric one (assuming Chinese prices), if it would cost more or less than "generative AI" and the AI data center buildout
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The fossil fuel industry is a high cost industry. There's a threshold where it stops being worth producing it.
If sufficient demand destruction occurs, in the wake of the war on Iran, their house of cards collapses.
The industry has become accustomed to huge bribes... ahem... fossil fuel subsidies too.
If those should end too...
https://energi.media/opinion/dnv-peak-oil-demand-destruction-hormuz-crisis/
https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2026/a-long-war-will-permanently-damage-oil-demand
@mcc give us electric TRAINS
@mcc
it might take a lot of diesel generators to generate enough electricity? 😬
@mcc What if instead we replaced every highway in the US with high speed rail? That's the US that *I* want to live in.
(High speed rail construction in Europe is something like $30M/km, and the Interstate system has a hair under 80,000km of highways, for a total of $2.4 trillion, which is roughly one and a half LLM bubbles. *However*, the source I found for that cost includes land acquisition, and the US already paid that cost the first time it bulldozed a bunch of minority neighborhoods to put highways through them, so…)
@whbboyd i dunno if you've ever visited Oklahoma or know what the population distribution there looks like
@whbboyd now note the highways there *replaced* a system based on trains that were originally used to populate the state, but part of how that worked was most homesteads being isolated for many months at a time.
@mcc 300M cars times $10k reasonable price for simple EV = $3 trillion. Way less than the amount they've burnt on AI shit.
@mcc there are about 290ish million non-electric cars in the us so at 10k per electric car vs 1.5 trillion for the AI buildout it would be about 2 AI buildouts.
@mcc How much high speed rail would AI spending build?
(Especially if we spent all this “invention” on figuring out how to build infrastructure cheaper like most everywhere else in the world …)