Doing the Carbon Math

It started small, the way these things always do. Someone in the server said I shouldn't be using gen-AI for images, and I pushed back — not defensively, just genuinely curious what the actual cost was, because I didn't know. That's usually where I start. And somewhere in the back-and-forth the word "selfish" got used. Not about anything dramatic. About making pictures on a Friday night.

I noticed the word land somewhere old in me before I noticed anything else. I've spent a long time building a worldview where agency is the thing that matters — where you carry what's actually yours to carry and you don't let other people's discomfort quietly become your debt. So "selfish" wasn't really a word about carbon. It was a bid to make me the problem without ever having to prove it. So I did what I do, which is go get the numbers.

Turns out a night of generating images is something like 0.5 kg of CO2 — less than driving six miles round trip to a theater, less than the theater's own HVAC running for the two and a half hours you're in the seat. I pulled the thread further. What if I had an EV, would that close the gap? Barely. What if I stripped out the theater's inflated line items and just put driving against images head to head? Still ahead, just less dramatically.

Then I turned it on myself, because that felt more honest than winning an argument. Gas car, suburb, Taiwan every couple years, an AI habit that would make most people blink — add it all up and I land around 18 to 20 tons a year. Three or four times the global average, somewhere in the top two to four percent of individual emitters on the whole planet. And the AI use, the thing I got called selfish for, was the smallest line on the entire page. A rounding error next to the house. A rounding error next to the car I need just to exist out here. The guilt was aimed at the one thing that barely moves the needle, while the actual weight — the home, the flight, the infrastructure I didn't choose and can't opt out of — sat there unexamined, because it's invisible. It doesn't feel like a decision. It just feels like life.

One more number that's almost funny in hindsight: only about 1.8% of the world even touches these tools monthly, less than one in fifty people. So the fight wasn't really humanity versus AI's footprint. It was a small, wealthy, well-connected corner of the world — the same corner that owns the cars and books the flights — arguing with itself about its smallest expense, and reaching for guilt instead of arithmetic to do it.

I don't think the person was trying to be cruel. Guilt is just an easier lever to pull than a real structural argument, especially in a Discord message at 6am. But I know the difference now, in my body as much as my head — between someone asking me to think harder, which I'll always take, and someone asking me to feel bad instead of think, which I won't. If I'm going to reduce anything, I'd rather do it where it's actually real and not just where it happens to be loud.