Tools to measure software energy consumption from your computer

for systems that use modeling that was built using measurement hardware, and then are able to make predictions without the hardware for android, also see:

A. Pathak, et, al, “Fine- grained power modeling for smartphones using system call tracing,” http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1966445.1966460

L. Zhang, et, al. “Accurate online power estimation and automatic battery behavior based power model generation for smartphones”

i think that some android platform dev boards also have specialized hardware and that qualcomm has a whole system for measuring baseband energy usage.

I agree with you that "your app using 15% less power" is not a priority and that governments should be more involved. However, "nationalizing and seizing energy corporations " makes no difference, either.

What is your aim for the energy sector here?

To decarbonise it requires a lot of capital investment and innovation and it's only pragmatic to involve the private sector through the right incentives (both carrot and stick). It's also pragmatic to involve the state because private companies are not very good at projects that require high capital investments for very long term goals (for example, developing and building nuclear plants).

Also worth a mention is that Mozilla provide some cross-platform power monitoring tools as part of Firefox which you can build and run yourself:

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/tools_po...

and a good description of how power consumption actually happens: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/power_pr...

> Can you imagine not being able to heat your apartment/home, or your stores being empty because there's no fuel for trucks? Unless you can really picture that and still tell yourself "yup, I really do want that," you shouldn't be excited/confident about what you're proposing.

This seems like an exaggeration. If anything, compare the current CO2 emissions per capita by country to get a better picture of how things would be in reality: https://i.redd.it/mnt8im0yvvd41.png

It'd probably be a shift in your standard of living, for example when going from the situation in the US (16.5 tonnes of CO2 per capita) to the situation in the UK (5.7 tonnes of CO2 per capita). I wouldn't say that the people in the UK have empty stores, but they definitely have a less rampant disregard for the environment while chasing profit margins.

In practice, if you wanted to be more environmentally friendly, you'd drive a hatchback instead of a SUV or would use public transportation, would live in an apartment building instead of having your own house, would eat meat once a week instead of once a day, would have a new phone and computer every 5 years instead of every year, as well as would do all of the other things that responsible people should do, including exercising your rights within a democratic government. That also seems to be working out great for the Scandinavian countries.

But the most important thing - you'd stop having so many kids and would lower your population density, on the path to which most European countries are already on. On an unrelated note, where i live (Latvia), heating my house is a matter of fetching some firewood and lighting the furnace: that way central heating takes care of making the rooms warm for everyone who lives in the house, while i can also use the furnace for making bread or anything else.

Sources for the visualization:

  [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ew2sn7/per_capita_co2_emissions_by_country_oc/
  [1] https://www.icos-cp.eu/science-and-impact/global-carbon-budget/2019
  [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

I agree with the broader point -- there should be real legal and regulatory action, including things that many people find verboten like expropriation and nationalization, in the transportation, energy production, and food production sectors.

But I don't see the need to poo-poo this. Think of a complex multifaceted problem as a 2x2 square, where one axis is difficulty and the other axis is impact. I think it's very reasonable to defend a strategy that tackles high difficulty high impact problems + low difficulty problems regardless of impact, just because it creates a steady cadence of incremental wins, which are energizing.