51–60 of 99 posts
None of the websites or posts on this topic that I've come across contain any numbers. Would it really make a difference for the average project? Honest question.
https://lowimpact.organicbasics.com/eur Is an example website that I enjoyed that shows you how much carbon you’re effectively saving by viewing their low impact version for each request.
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Unless we have systemic change (e.g., border adjusted carbon tax), anything we try to do as individuals is going to be penny wise and pound foolish. Most of our carbon footprint comes from industry (including transporting goods). Much of that presumably comes from our trade with China both in terms of their lax pollution laws and then transporting goods across the Pacific. None of that is going to change unless we st…
Not buying stuff you don't need and the like are measures and individual can take that don't have hidden carbon downsides.
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Unless we have systemic change (e.g., border adjusted carbon tax), anything we try to do as individuals is going to be penny wise and pound foolish. Most of our carbon footprint comes from industry (including transporting goods). Much of that presumably comes from our trade with China both in terms of their lax pollution laws and then transporting goods across the Pacific. None of that is going to change unless we st…
Not buying stuff you don't need and the like are measures and individual can take that don't have hidden carbon downsides.
All of the lifestyle changes we make that give us the warm fuzzies won't make a difference and certainly won't get us where we need to be with respect to global temperature change.
Let me stop this right there. We as software engineers have to stop turning a blind eye to the impacts of the actual businesses our code is for. It isn't "green software engineering" if the businesses we are helping are by design net negative for the environment.
Don't help the ad industry create more needs that don't increase well-being, either directly by working for them or via monetization of some other service. Don't work for surveillance capitalists. Don't build software for industries selling vanity commodities or ones that are based on planned obsolesence. In general, make sure the purpose of your code isn't to accelerate overconsumption.
After that is taken care of, these are solid points.
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Not buying stuff you don't need and the like are measures and individual can take that don't have hidden carbon downsides.
But they don't even amount to a rounding error. It might be a big personal sacrifice to give up your SUV or meat or whatever, but you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking you're doing anything for the environment because it's not even a drop in the ocean. It's literally negligible, immeasurable, etc. The only thing we can reasonably do is lobby our legislators for carbon pricing, including giving or volunteering w…
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> So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus. I think that's the whole game right there -- figure out how to make sure negative externalities stop being external and become part of the cost. Then incentives will naturally align, as opposed to being at odds. In the case…
In particular, there are all sorts of incentives for adtech to burn CPU on the _client_, which doesn't cost them anything. It's entirely possible to burn 0.1cent of electricity to earn 0.001cent of ad revenue.
Slow ad loading costs them more in lost revenue than the electricity used, so the incentives are still aligned.
Instead of micromanaging performance and energy usage; use data centers that use clean energy. It's dirty energy that we need to stop using. Clean energy, we should feel less constrained about (without wasting it obviously). Long term when we have a surplus, it shouldn't matter how much we use. Short term, increased demand actually grows the renewable supply mostly because that is the cheapest way to meet that demand…
There is no such thing as "clean energy". Energy always entails environmental impact. As an example, a wind turbine has large environment impact: * During its production: mining to get the metals, heavy metal work like making steel, cement, resins, etc. Digging large mines, driving trucks all around with heavy materials * During its operations: noise, visual pollution, often destroying wildlife sites as people don't…
What is the best material you found on "full comprehensive costs (including downsides and externalities) of energy sources"?
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> So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus. I think that's the whole game right there -- figure out how to make sure negative externalities stop being external and become part of the cost. Then incentives will naturally align, as opposed to being at odds. In the case…
Honestly, the number one thing any of us can do for the climate is to contact our representatives regularly about climate pricing. Absent that, we’ll never slow our pollution enough to stop runaway warming. Everything else is a micro optimization that may even distract us from the only thing that will get us over the line.
That's probably correct.
> Absent that, we’ll never slow our pollution enough to stop runaway warming.
But that's probably wrong. People managed to make non-polluting energy sources more compelling than the polluting ones even when the pollution is fully externalized. We will probably see a huge change on the next 20 years, and after that it will probably be better to focus on carbon capture.
What may make the first part incorrect is that focusing on intervention on the energy supply to speed-up the process may be more effective than focusing on intervention on the energy consumption. But if I had to design a policy today, I'd go almost all for the government to focus on consumption (AKA pollution taxing) and basic research.
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In particular, there are all sorts of incentives for adtech to burn CPU on the _client_, which doesn't cost them anything. It's entirely possible to burn 0.1cent of electricity to earn 0.001cent of ad revenue.
Adtech as a whole totally earns far more revenue than the electricity cost to run all that client side javascript. Slow ad loading costs them more in lost revenue than the electricity used, so the incentives are still aligned.