Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 51 posts

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

#21

Post by RedNifre »

jen729w wrote: post #19
RedNifre wrote: post #11

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 aucti…

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 t…

Right, I was talking more about how it SHOULD work. As you correctly said, it doesn't work at all right now. As in, no CO2 can be emitted, before buying the offset first. It's the only solution I can see, but I agree that it's unlikely to be implemented like this.

As for "China and the like want to grow", they shouldn't and the countries who already emitted a lot of CO2 should have a certificate debt that they need to pay back, slowing their economies down, which would also let the others catch up.

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

#22

Post by quickthrower2 »

RedNifre wrote: post #11

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 aucti…

An international carbon price would be awesome, yes.

As long as the carbon sinks are genuine. Planting a tree that later dies or burns is not carbon negative.

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

#24

Post by RedNifre »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #22
RedNifre wrote: post #11

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 aucti…

An international carbon price would be awesome, yes. As long as the carbon sinks are genuine. Planting a tree that later dies or burns is not carbon negative.

Not a carbon "price", just an auction of CO2 ton equivalents to keep the atmosphere balanced: Before a plane lifts off, the CO2 equivalent offsets need to be bought at the global auction house. This would make the market regulate the price of CO2 emissions.

(Not sure how the certificates work in reality right now, probably some BS like giving each country a "CO2 budget" in certificates for free, pretending adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would be fine or something like this)

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

#25

Post by 000ooo000 »

I can't help but feel that the performance of software with regard to its impact on the climate is a long way down the list behind far more effective but also polarising ideas such as abstaining from the consumption of animal products, limiting the number of children one has, etc.

I ran the websitecarbon.com calculator against my org's public website. For 10k/y visits, about 42kg of CO2 is emitted. Dubious how that's calculated, but let's say it's off by 10x and the emissions are closer to 420kg. Apparently, the average Australian emits 17t/y of CO2. If I were going to attempt to reduce my carbon footprint, there's probably something far more valuable I could be doing than worrying about 20kb of JS.

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

#26

Post by RedNifre »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #16

I call this kind of clownery "climate masochism". If you really want to do something for the environment, don‘t have children and become part of the voluntary human extinction movement. Anything else is nothing but lipstick on the pig.

What should people do, who are against climate change, because they are AGAINST human extinction?

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

#27

Post by daydream »

gizmo wrote: post #14

Frankly, I think efforts like these are misguided. We are collectively rewriting desktop apps to run in the browser, where not only it runs 50x slower than on the desktop, but all data has to be downloaded time and again from servers. The amount of waste here is staggering. And yet, desktop apps have so many issues (installation/breakage/crashes) that web apps are the only way to deliver software that just works. Web…

> And yet, desktop apps have so many issues (installation/breakage/crashes) that web apps are the only way to deliver software BNb that just works.

I never have any installation or breakage issues with desktop apps and crashes are very few and far between nowadays.

In contrast so many websites track every single little action I do, waste massive amounts of energy on said tracking/showing ads/invading my privacy, and have a crap user experience chock full of dark patterns.

I’ll take desktop apps any day of the week, thanks.

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

#29

Post by Traubenfuchs »

RedNifre wrote: post #26
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #16

I call this kind of clownery "climate masochism". If you really want to do something for the environment, don‘t have children and become part of the voluntary human extinction movement. Anything else is nothing but lipstick on the pig.

What should people do, who are against climate change, because they are AGAINST human extinction?

I guess we all agree that continuing as is is clearly unsustainable. The one and only alternative to full human extinction is radically scaling down humanity, primarily quantitatively. We would still need some amount of people, ideally geographically distributed to stay resilient against god knows what else will come in the future.

I am not well versed at all in the multiple disciplines one needs to talk about this in technical detail, but I guess 500.000 people per habitable continent should be enough?

I do realize this is impossible to enforce top down or get the people to do bottom up. As the evolutionary greedy animals we are, we will continue to procreate.

After all this rambling my short, personal answer: The only possible thing is becomming true eco terrorists and genociding 99% of the world population somehow. Boom. 99% of the ecological/climate foot print humanity has evaporated!

To the appalled reader: I‘d prefer reasonable counter arguments over downvotes and flags...

Post reply on HN