Ask HN - CO2 emissions and cloud computing

3 points·jagira··7 comments

Who is responsible for the CO2 generated by cloud infrastructure? The company which is consuming it or the cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon or Rackspace.

And who will be taxed for those emissions?

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Given that datacenters are powered by electricity, the amount of CO2 would depend on how the electricity was produced. Since the utility company providing the electricity is responsible for how it is produced any CO2 taxes should be paid by them.

What if they are not liable to pay CO2 taxes?

Levying taxes on emissions any other way would be a nightmare to implement fairly, be very inefficient, and would be ripe for abuse and fraud. The whole carbon credit system is about the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

In any sane system, the CO2 emitter would be taxed --- the electricity generation company. This would be the same as the cloud provider if they generated their own electricity and that caused CO2 emissions.

Do you have any specific CO2 tax regime in mind? EU? US?

If you mean who is responsible in a moral sense, all three are responsible to some degree, as are the consuming company's customers.

Let us assume that the provider's data center is in country like Saudi Arabia, where there is no carbon tax and the provider does not include the carbon offset charges in the invoice.

Would it make sense for an enterprise (EU/US) to have its entire IT infra hosted by such cloud provider and save some carbon tax?

Interesting question. I think it should be the company that use it, but Amazon can collect those taxes with its fees and pass them on, like with sales tax.

What if Amazon is not accounting the emissions while billing them?

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