This is the opposite, though. In order to cobble together a number that seems even remotely problematic they had to combine several things that are weakly related: all IT workloads, plus all wireless networks. They also needed to express it in terms of global electricity, instead of global primary energy, because it is absolutely dwarfed by fuel burned for transport. Finally, this is a consumer that can be trivially decarbonized.

Compare private passenger cars which are ~12% of global CO2 and there are no practical ways to decarbonize that.

Ya, nobody has figured out public transport. it’s a myth

How do you decarbonize IT workloads in a trivial way?

Anything that is already purely electric is trivial to switch to non-fossil energy.

If it is trivial, why are we still using coal and gas to power electricity grids?

Parent used the mathematician’s definition of ”trivial”, which is: “we know how to do it.”

This is different from the layman use,for us “trivial” means “Super easy.”

I thought it meant “super easy” for mathematics too? Interesting.

Never trust a mathematician wrt trivial | left as an exercise to the reader :

    "One day Shizuo Kakutani was teaching a class at Yale. He wrote down a lemma on the blackboard and announced that the proof was obvious. One student timidly raised his hand and said that it wasn't obvious to him. Could Kakutani explain?

    After several moments' thought, Kakutani realized that he could not himself prove the lemma. He apologized, and said that he would report back at their next class meeting.

    After class, Kakutani, went straight to his office. He labored for quite a time and found that he could not prove the pesky lemma. He skipped lunch and went to the library to track down the lemma. After much work, he finally found the original paper. The lemma was stated clearly and succinctly. For the proof, the author had written, 'Exercise for the reader.'

    The author of this 1941 paper was Kakutani."

Mathematical Apocrypha Steven Krantz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shizuo_Kakutani

Because Greenpeace and the likes defamed nuclear power.

To wit, German coal plants currently emit 10 times as much CO2 as the whole French airline industry.

Money?

Also, in some cases various types of obstructionism. I've heard several stories (including some from my home state) of wind farms being fought against tooth and nail, even in cases where the negative impact is somewhere between tiny and minimal (e.g. the only town nearby would see them as 1" tall on the horizon). Some of this is no doubt thanks to campaigns from incumbent energy providers and other underhanded methods like weaponization of environmental regulations.

By reducing the workload, eg. using lower resolution video