Hacker News Reader

Comment by anyonecancode | Hacker News Reader

> 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 of your comment, you're noting they're already aligned, but overall I think many times they are not.

View on HN

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.

> the number one thing any of us can do for the climate is to contact our representatives regularly about climate pricing

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.

> 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.

I don't think this is true. In particular, while the price is lower for "non-polluting", we still don't have an answer for clean base load generation (well, we do--nuclear--but that seems to be off the table). Even ignoring the storage problem, I don't think we (Americans) are on track to power our entire economy with renewables by 2050. We'll probably be able to meet our current electricity demand with renewable energy by 2050, but we also need to electrify almost every other sector in our economy--most notably transportation--which means we need to generate a whole lot more electricity than we do today.

Also, if wealthy countries don't implement any kind of border adjustment, we'll just keep outsourcing our pollution to the likes of China who will happily keep burning (ever cheaper) oil.

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.

I don't think this is proven either way. The only research I am aware of is https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/5095958/Hidden-Energy-Costs.... which puts ads at about 3.4% of PC web browsing energy use, but that's not a financial number.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com