Ask HN: As a developer, do you consider the carbon footprint of your apps?

Of course not, my software does not put CO2 or CO2 equivalents into the atmosphere.

What matters is keeping the atmosphere balanced or even remove greenhouse gases from it. The way to do it is to have serious carbon certificates, as in coal power plants need to buy carbon certificates before they emit CO2 and the certificates get destroyed after, Brazil gets certificates for having a rain forest, which they can auction off internationally to motivate them to not destroy the rain forest and also to make planes fly etc. If my software costs too much electricity, it will either mean that people switch to cheaper electricity (renewables, since they don't have to buy the certificates), or they will switch to a different software that consumes less of their expensive coal power.

If all green house gas emissions have to be set off by certificates first (or by 1.1x the certificates, to lower the green house gas levels), you won't have to worry about where the power for your software comes from, since it's all accounted for already and if your software really costs too much electricity, the market will regulate it.

Certainly for desktop software and user utilities I take consideration of power consumption and idle load especially. There is a strong overlap with performance but also there is being a well behaved application that doesn't consume resources when the user isn't directly doing anything.

Its a common reason why I get rid of open source self hosted apps. If they hammer the disk all the time or seem to constantly impact the CPU when they shouldn't be then it gets replaced. I want my NAS asleep unless it has to be doing something. Its a consideration I raise bugs around and its something all software I have ever written takes account of.

First of all, that 'carbon calculator' website is total bunk. How the hell do you tell how much work needs to be done in the back-end to display your page?

How does it tell apart if a site lazy-loads, meaning it might do less work on first load, but does way more total traffic to render all the information the user requests?

I'd wager the majority of energy is spent in the backend, where the majority of the energy will be spent between microservices ping-ponging each other.

How does this compare to say switching to n electric car?

I think it's important people focus their efforts on the low hanging fruit. What's the biggest impact at the lowest cost.

None of this works.

Our carbon emissions continue to grow. Every year is larger than the last. The largest year for emissions in human history was 2022. The next will be 2023, and then 2024 will beat it.

Our rate of growth is slowing, but we continue to grow. It is possible that by 2050 we stop beating our previous records. Possible. Probably not.

That wasn’t a typo. We will continue to emit more carbon than we did the previous year for at least another 25 years.

Certificates are bullshit. Brazil ‘selling’ its rainforest carbon offsets to China is bullshit.

There isn’t a resolution here. There’s no answer, currently. It looks like we’re just fucked. We have decent power generation solutions but no grid to accept them. China and the like want to grow, they want to use coal, and who are we to say no? We did it. Should we expect them not to?

No individual can make any difference at all while the major economies of the latter half of this century invest — as in, start to build, today — dozens of coal-fired power stations. It might even be hundreds. It saddens me to think about looking it up, so I’m not going to.

Worrying about the carbon cost of your app is a nice thought, but nothing more. It’s functionally pointless.