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Comment by boomlinde | Hacker News Reader

Why bother improving anything at all if it doesn't immediately save the world in itself?

Or recently: why bother wearing face mask at all if it doesn't fully prevent covid-19?

Or: why should I do my part when everyone's selfish?

Because other things achieve something. Me getting a new job won't save the world, but it will improve my income. This achieves nothing at all, for me or for the environment.

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.

Nobody is saying that improving data center efficiency will save the world. But saying that it achieves nothing at all is another extreme.

> 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.

I agree that doing nothing isn't a solution. But that doesn't make this a solution either. That's sort of my wider point here. We need an actual solution, this isn't that, this might be part of that, but until we have that, it's not worth anything.

I agree that we need an actual, real, global solution. But where will it come from? It's not like some benevolent aliens will write up a grand plan and hand it down to us. No. The final solution will consist of a myriad of sub solutions and measures. And improving data center efficiency will be a (albite a small one) part of it. So it's nice to have it (and other parts) at hand ready. You know, just in case the next congress gets serious about tackling the climate crisis.

The issue I have is that we have had sub-solutions for decades. We've always lacked the overall strategy and will. More subsolutions is not useful because it won't create an overall strategy.

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.

You do have a point. We absolutely lack any meaningful action, unfortunately.

> 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.

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.

I think influence is 100 times better than individual action. But I also think the same logic applies: if it hasn't worked for 50 years, and things have gotten much much worse, why will it suddenly succeed in the next 10?

Society's view of climate change has shifted over the past 50 years; I think that individual actions contribute to shifting society's view on things.

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