I was curious whether i should be concerned about the carbon emissions from chatgpt

I shouldn’t be, and you probably shouldn’t be either. While ChatGPT usage leads to an increase in your carbon emissions, other choices you make cause orders of magnitude more emissions.

Using the most liberal (in this case, highest) estimate of carbon emissions from a query from chatgpt, a single query (queries dominate training in terms of energy usage) will use .01 kWh of electricity.

If I’m a power user of ChatGPT and use it 40 times a day for 365 days in a year, this means I’m using

40 queries per day x 365 days per year x .01 kWh per query= 146 kWh

On average, for each kWh used, .81 pounds of CO2 emissions are released, resulting in

146 kWh x .81 pounds CO2 per kWh = 118 pounds of CO2

This isn’t a very tractable number. But, assuming I drive a gasoline car that gets 25 mpg, here’s what generates the same amount of CO2.

If the grocery store is 5 miles away, this is 15 trips to the grocery store and back.

If I commute 10 miles to work every day, this is 7.5 commutes.

If I go on a road trip from Chicago to LA, this is 6.25% of my trip.

Let’s say I switch to an EV from a gasoline car and that I commute 20 miles to work and back every day.

Driving my gas car leads to the production of 3872 pounds of CO2. If I switch to an EV, it would be about a fourth of that, effectively saving nearly 3000 pounds of CO2 emissions.

This is one of many examples where the emissions from ChatGPT are orders of magnitude smaller than the emissions from other decisions you make. Two 3-hour plane rides and that’s the equivalent of 163,000 ChatGPT queries. Yep, that’s right - 163,000.

Eating red meat once a week? That’s 75% of a ton. If you replaced that with chicken, it would only be 7.5%.

The real concern shouldn’t be ChatGPT. It should be decisions to live far from family (where you’ll fly often), driving a gasoline-powered car, and eating red meat.

This is whataboutism!

I don’t think it is at all. The reality is that each human is resource constrained and we are limited in what we can spend our time thinking about. The reality is that emissions from a gasoline car far outweigh those from ChatGPT queries (even if you’re among the biggest power users).

The upshot is as follows: before you start trying to eliminate ChatGPT from your life, it may be far more worthwhile to prioritize eliminating other choices such as driving an EV and not eating red meat.

Frankly, spending your time concerned about AI’s carbon emissions is like using a spoon to shovel shovel (yes, that’s an exaggeration).

From a policy perspective, it’s far more effective to target increasing clean electricity generation as opposed to going after AI. One is far more upstream of the other and likely will have a bigger impact.

Also, if you want to offset the CO2 emissions produced by your ChatGPT usage for the yera, you can do so here at Wren. It will cost $1.50 (and this is likely an overestimate). If you want to offset all your carbon emissions, it will cost you ~$350 if you’re an average American.