Comment by pauldjohnston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pauldjohnston | Hacker News Reader

Well, having done some research into this recently, the tech world has something it can do right now. Switch to sustainably powered Cloud and move to renewably powered/offset Data Centres.

e.g. Google (100% carbon neutral), Azure (100% offset), AWS (Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt regions are 100% carbon neutral)

Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (bet you didn't know that).

There is also research showing that we're going to increase our Data Centre usage by 5x in the next 7 years.

So change that 2% to something much much higher... because that much compute requires that much more energy and we don't have the worldwide renewables infrastructure at scale to cope with the extra capacity.

https://bit.ly/2024wp

https://www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-by-2024

* Sign the pledge please * (if you agree with it of course)

It's almost the simplest thing we can easily do, and it should put pressure on tech companies to switch to renewables.

If we believe the tech industry is an innovator and a force for good, why not start with the means of production - the energy industry?

Sign up... switch... go!

PS I wrote the whitepaper with Anne Currie - we have not been paid for the work and was entirely voluntary. I used to work for AWS up until June this year.

Agreed, this is one for commercial votes ($). We're a rich industry that uses loads of electricity, most of which is fossil-fueled. We need to choose to run our servers 100% carbon neutral and that would make way more difference than individual action. That will get more spending on renewable generation. Our industry has the money and we can personally just choose to host somewhere carbon neutral (as mentioned, Google, Azure or the 4 sustainable AWS regions: Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt right now)

I wonder what percentage of CO2 comes from programmers commuting to work.

Go remote! the planet, along with your family, sanity, and happiness will thank you!

Every working programmer today can stand up, walk to their boss' desk, and have the conversation about going remote, even if only part time (for now). If they say no, ask how you can work towards that in the future, and if they don't relent, find a different job (don't immediately quit, obviously; now you have leverage in knowing that you want another job, but don't need it quite yet). When doing your job search, the first question you should ask is, "is the position remote friendly?"

Let's change the industry's culture from the ground up.

Stupid question; when saying 'go remote' you mean working from home right?

Essentially, but the joy of working remote is being able to work whenever you happen to be, whether it be on the road (I thought I saw an article about this but I fail to remember the author) or in your home office

This is a great point. This summer, I took my family for a week of beaching, boating, and snorkeling. I also worked the full week ... of course my boss knew what was up, as I'm up front about everything. But it was great being able to just modify my schedule, go snorkeling in the morning, come back, work, dinner, and then work a few more hours at night. All you gotta do is make sure that the place you're staying has wifi.

yes ... mostly :) I'll give my own example ... I work for a team/company in another state. So on most days, yes, I work from home. However, part time, I go into a local co-working space. This gives me a chance to get out of the house, socialize with other technical people IRL, etc etc. If I didn't have a co-working space available, I would probably try to band together a few folks and rent a small office somewhere to similar effect.

So, while for many people yeah it means working from home ... it doesn't necessarily have to mean working at your house :D

A couple of others:

Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/?country=en

OVH also has an energy efficient data centre in Quebec powered by a hydroelectric dam.

Thanks! Just read the white paper. Super interesting. Just signed the petition

> Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Is it just from electricity or the total operation? What about manufacturing and hardware replacements/maintenance? Is significant?

So it is relatively difficult to get exact data and all we can really get from the information supplied is electricity usage. That, plus the mix of electricity in the Data Centre location gives an approximation (again, it's an educated guess) of carbon emissions related to a site. Efficiencies are actually an irrelevance due to the rapid increase in usage swallowing up any gains caused by efficiencies.

Oh and the 2% from Data Centres is a conservative estimate. It's probably higher. We simply don't have the data because it's not required to share it.

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