Data centers can slash CO2 emissions 88% or more (2013)
energy.stanford.edu
energy.stanford.edu
The number from the first sentence is misleading. The internet consumes about 4 percent of the world's electricity[0], data centers are just one part of it. Citation needed for the second sentence. Americans own about 25 electronic devices per household[1], and that wouldn't be the case without internet. We now stream music from YouTube all day long instead of putting one CD on repeat. A kindle costs 170kgCO2e to manufacture, whereas a second-hand book close to 0. The carbon footprint associated with the digital revolution is not clear cut because of all those behaviour changes.
IF we used new technology only to gain efficiency, and not to consume more without energy gains, this would hold true. But society is not doing that.
[0] https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-onl... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/02/24-electroni...
How is it misleading? It says "Data centers consume about 1.5 percent of the world’s electricity". It does not say anything about the internet.
Some (many?) buyers gets the latest Kindle only because they can resell the old one at a good price to second-hand buyers. Can we hold first buyers responsible for all the emissions when others partake in the product life that require new products to be created in the first place?
(And create fun, intellectually challenging jobs for us engineers)
"A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions" is what 27 Nobel laureate economists and about 4000 other economists said in a statement in January 2019 [1]. There are some opposing opinions on some details [2]. Anyway, to an outsider this appears to be the scientific consensus.
[1] https://www.econstatement.org/
[2] http://standupeconomist.com/why-im-not-signing-the-economist...
For some reason carbon tax seems like a lot of extra and complicated steps to just tax fossil fuels way more. If we tax oil, coal and gas a lot, that's basically a simple way of taxing carbon emissions, isn't it? It's way simpler to manage, and actually sound like something realistic.
This is what carbon tax means. Taxing fuels according to their carbon content. Carbon content is easy to determine precisely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax
The imprecise part would be estimating and placing import taxes for products and services from countries that do not take part in the carbon tax system.
And countries that would pretend to tax carbon but "not try that hard" to stop illegal untaxed fossil fuel use.
They will drop their targets the moment the competition intensifies and threatens their profits. Voluntary commitments do not work. We have learned it the hard way over the last 30 years. Paris accord is a primary example of that.
There is of course always some nominal minimum power consumption for a server to be on. But every instruction requires some additional amount of electron flow to execute.
Look at it another way: if a machine is already in its highest power state, with all cores running, but only executing one thread per core, running another thread on each core may cost almost nothing in terms of energy but could boost instructions retired by a lot.
The marginal cost of each instruction in compressed at the high end of utilization. The first instruction costs a lot, but after you're already running it the best thing you can do for efficiency is take utilization on that machine straight to 100%.
And even if the machine is already on, giving it instructions to run will make it change the CPU frequency (DVFS), access the RAM, etc. which does increase its power usage.
Or is the number of people in fixed supply with close to fixed CO2 output and more optimized source code just means less source code, or more people optimizing source code and less people working in the hardware supply chain, or something else along those lines.
Edit: To be clear, this is a real question. I've been mentally debating for quite awhile whether or not I should allocate workers CO2 output to companies or not.
I also think that workers should be responsible for the CO2. Because otherwise, who is responsible?
We’re still building them globally to help give electricity to 7 billion people.
All these little ideas to save a fractional percent is like the drunk looking for his keys under the light.
Decade after decade of using coal like this is a much bigger problem.
All those CO2 emissions have now cost us much more time than saving 1% in 2030
Many companies like Apple and Google are using green energy for their data centers.
Solving the electricity problem in general, solves a much bigger problem.
As far as my own political sources claim, there is however little interest in cryptocurrency farms. To that end there is indeed rather some aversion to it, especially from the Conservative Right. On the other hand, if the Norwegian power grid is expanded for this interest, like it seems to be, I think also crypto farms would be interested as well.
[1]: Norwegian language source: https://www.digi.no/artikler/star-i-ko-for-a-koble-seg-pa-da...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Left_Party_(Norway)
[3]: Norwegian language source: https://www.nrk.no/vestland/datasentera-kan-auka-landets-kra...
We have a huge problem at the moment where people think they're achieving something by personally cutting their co2 emissions by a few kg per year. Global emissions continue to rise. So they're not achieving anything.
Before we can achieve something, we have to get people to realise they are not already solving the issue.
> people think they're achieving something by personally cutting their co2 emissions by a few kg per year.
If they reduce their emissions a bit and think that's enough - well, that's bad. If they realise it wasn't enough and more needs to be done - well, that's better than nothing. At least it's a step in the right direction.
I agree with you that global emissions just stubbornly continue to rise. Whatever we do to cut emissions just doesn't seem to matter somehow. And it's very frustrating. Yet, I think, just leaning back and doing nothing is not a solution.
Were in "1000 spoons when all you need is a knife" and we're rapidly searching for more spoons and celebrating spoon production.
They're actually worse than useless. People mistake more options for action. And people spend more time arguing over which sub solutions to implimented while implimenting nothing.
I used to think that. Now I believe that my behavior influences other people’s behavior, and that when people make these individual behavior changes they are precursors to those individuals also doing things like getting more politically involved with environmental causes, etc.
Small changes preclude bigger ones when it comes to human behavior (I think?).
Basically the individual actions can help shift social norms and that is important, is what I now believe.
Or: why should I do my part when everyone's selfish?
It might be difficult to measure a single such cut, but a few hundred could be noticeable. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/manage-your-expectat...
This is what no one seems to get. The change we want is not small, we don't actually care about about delaying this a year or two. It's avert disaster or don't.
We cant solve this problem one tonne at a time. We either all get together and solve it. Or we don't solve it at all.
Oh wait, no, emissions went up again while we've been talking and getting this ready. So we actually need one billion and three more solutions to get to the same place the original billion would have got is to.
This is the reality of it situation.
Sorry to be so bleak. But I think people (a) think we're making progress, and by any actual measure we are not and (b) think that piecemeal, you-do-you solutions will work, when they haven't for the last 50+ years.
That's what we've done for 40 years. It's failed every single year. It's failed disastrously badly.
We need accept this has failed in order to change to something that might work. At this point, even doing nothing would be better, at least it would save time and be honest.
There was this guy who debated with me online about using solar panels because 'they are not efficient enough' and another one who debated planting trees.
It is a step by step process. We will not magically cure up the ecology in one day in one swoosh. It'll take small efforts from various aspects.
We're definitely not moving fast enough, but we're still moving pretty fast on the economic proposition of renewables and electrified transportation alone.
Right now, We're not just emitting co2, we're emitting more this year than last year.
And the amount more is rising as well.
Any actual measure of co2E emissions shows this problem is bad, its getting worse and its getting worse faster over time.
But in this same system we are nearing a tipping point where renewables are the better choice for the bottom line. And that is progress.
We will see.
Japan's population is expected to be half. Spain and others are going in the same way, China and India are expected to reduce but not by half.
Let's hope that we keep working on this problem.
As EVs rise, I expect this to be a positive turnout. it doesn't matter that 1 EV save a lot of CO2, buses and planes are becoming electric. The more electrification we do, the more solar and wind we use, the better.
India has few hundred MW solar panel project. Other countries are also planning them, right? So let's hope that they do work in the intended way..
And a secret lag, one that no scientist, economist, politician or other expert has predicted or discovered. One effecting the whole globe.
And that huge lag cause would now need to suddenly stop causing lag (otherwise we're fucked).
And if you have all these factors, what would that mean? It would mean I was right, no point in further action, global warming was fixed around 1990 and no one noticed because of the lag!
A good analysis should look like this: https://www.withouthotair.com/