Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. When I see this type of thing, I am always turned off by people describing it as "greener" or “more sustainable”. Every small website having its own solar panel and hardware is not greener. People frequently think only of the carbon emissions of the energy used by the hardware once it's running, ignoring the carbon (and raw material) cost of building that hardware. Serving websites is an area where capitalism…
> Serving websites is an area where capitalism’s promise of achieving efficiency of resource utilization through economic incentives probably actually works, via shared hardware. Most of the environmental impact happens at the building of hardware, so putting even more websites in datacenter only increases environmental impact. All Capitalism has done here is completely forget that impact by telling you it's ok to do…
I think a more likely way of changing usage patterns is by actually pricing carbon cost into energy production and manufacturing via taxes. The costs of things are only so low because we are borrowing from the future. I don't think a mindset shift will happen under capitalism without the monetary cost of things increasing. And I don't think capitalism will change unless by collapsing, at which point we're too late anyway, and would come with much human suffering. I don't believe that capitalism is fundamentally broken, but I do believe that unchecked capitalism is. Regulation and taxes are required to manage its negative tendencies.