I feel compelled to bring this article up, especially since last time it was brought up on HN people seemed sure in the comments that it was not a common sentiment.
https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/no-your-clean-c...
I agree with the gist of this article, but I think if you are not a FAANG as the article suggests, then you probably also are not at a scale where your carbon impact is actually measurable...
It's not hard to have a startup that does use 100kW of servers and maybe about 150kW total-- HVAC, networking, UPS inefficiencies, etc.
There's about 450 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour from typical electrical generation. Therefore this is about 600 tonnes of CO2-- not counting other lifecycle costs.
On the one hand, this is a tiny smidgen of overall CO2 emissions. On the other hand, this is about 80 households worth of CO2 emissions.
As a developer, making this kind of thing 1% more efficient is the same magnitude as completely eliminating your home carbon footprint, and is a whole hell of a lot more plausible to do.
I know offsets are "cheap" at $10 per tonne or whatever as the article says. On the other hand, please don't really assume that buying $6k of offsets really does as much good as eliminating 600 tonnes of emissions for realsies.
A typical CPU in a cloud datacenter is maybe only 10% utilised. That's mostly due to unsold capacity and poor bin packing on many levels (user has an oversized kube cluster, the cloud provider has spare machines, etc.). Many cloud machines just sit idle for years on end because someone has forgotten about them. In many cases, those idle resources are not used for lower priority jobs either, since they are being paid for by a customer.
You could also skip the machine reservation and get better utilization by using GAE or similar.
Maybe packed in with other public cloud things? I thought the partitioning between public and private resources was done at a pretty coarse level, but might misremember.
IMO more relevant is that Google public cloud resources are carbon neutral, at least wrt electricity. (Through buying green power and emissions credits, to the degree you believe the prices and the models I guess.)
Bursting to 100k servers for 24 hours rather than properly engineering the code is a trade-off that frequently gets suggested now that the cloud is an option.
Slice 25% off the numbers I said, which assumed an overhead of 50% instead of your suggested 10%. It doesn't change the point at all.
As a parallel let's look at diets[0] (independent gives higher numbers[1]). Lots of people reduce their meat intake to reduce their personal carbon footprint. But the average diet is about 2000 kgCO2eq/yr (3000 via Independent). A vegetarian diet is about 1200kg and a vegan is around 250kg (potentially dubious claim but it is for sure less than a mean and less than a vegetarian diet). 10 websites changing to local fonts is like a single person changing to a vegetarian diet.
The logic here is that you could $20-$30/yr and completely eliminate your dietary footprint, which is much easier than changing diets. So are what these people doing useless? No. It helps because the aggregate. It helps because it makes people conscious of the problem and how their choices affect the world. But yeah, big corporations should be doing more, but without them doing something that doesn't mean you should give up and do nothing.
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/climate-change-carbon-e...
But I also probably wouldn’t pick it up on principle so the person who dropped it could come back and get it.
I don’t know how to extend your analogy to account for my process though.
There ~7.8 billion people on the planet. If you vote (let's say everyone votes for the sake of the argument), you're increasing the percentage of people voting by ~0.0000000128%.
This change is just as "meaningless" as that one, so... don't go vote?
At some point you need to stop focusing on stupid shit when planting a tree does far more.
Sure, don't expect to change the world on it alone. But if every industry takes on an awareness of this sort of thing, and each niche within an industry discovers some way to shave a fraction of % off it's emissions, it will all add up significantly.
Doing this kinds of thing is always going to be a game of inches, not miles. We can't say "It won't even get us a mile, why should we bother?" Be realistic about it by all means, but take the easy inches when they present themselve.
I know if I tried to get our people to shut down half of our current infrastructure people (who have no real knowledge of any actual load numbers) would never allow that...
So much political nonsense... It's been a long week :)
If a review stops me from buying the wrong product, what's the footprint of that?