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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the carbon impact the use of those inefficient dynamic languages has had, in both desktop and backend environments?

I imagine it's substantial and worth considering.

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Think of how much electricity is spent on cryptocurrency grifting, training state of the art AI so that it can help trick the elderly into clicking on ads, distributing porn, and streaming videos of kids eating tide pods. I think that eclipses the cost of developers using Rails or Django for their server backend.

I don’t think we have a problem with the “how” as much as the “what” or “why”.

Generally agreed but I don't think "distributing porn" compares to the other examples given. There's definitely a subset of porn that treats involved parties fairly and doesn't pose ethical problems. Demonizing porn as a medium only pushes it into a moral grey zone which benefits harmful entities because there's less public awareness of their actions.

> Demonizing porn as a medium only pushes it into a moral grey zone which benefits harmful entities because there's less public awareness of their actions.

ObNitpick: I think porn is a genre rather than a medium.

You're right, I wasn't sure what to call it but "genre" is probably more fitting.

When PHP 7 was released, Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, said the performance improvements meant fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity - all of which equalled less power or electricity consumed. (And remember this is an interpreted language.)

When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. You can watch a segment from his presentation where he talks about this here - and the calculations he made of potential CO2 savings:

https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s

I bet it is completely insignificant in the great scheme. The average American, for example, uses the equivalent of 4 kW of motor fuels continuously, not even counting electricity consumption. It doesn't amount to a hill of beans if the Dropbox sync client uses an extra joule here and there because it's written in Python instead of C++.

> The average American, for example, uses the equivalent of 4 kW of motor fuels continuously

how is that possible ? I have a normal house with a few appliances turned on, plus three fairly powerful computers and some musical gear and I'm at 530VA right now according to my home's electricity meter

But how do you move yourself from place to place?

Note that it's not necessary for you to personally burn the three gallons of fuel per day. It's an average.

I drive on average 8k kilometers per year. I doubt that this is amounting to all the rest, is it ?

a quick computation gives me, given that my car drinks roughly 7 liters of diesel / 100km if i'm not careful:

- 560 liters of diesel / year

- a liter of diesel is apparently ~10.74 kwh -> 6014 kwh total

- 6014 / 365 -> 16 kwh a day ? I don't see how this is making me any closer to 4000 kwh per day.

By your metric ways I see you might not be an American. However, you can readily divide the total motor fuel consumption in the US by the population in the US, and use your figure of energy per liter (which is a bit higher than pertrol, but it doesn't matter).

The point is that the global emissions story boils down to transport fuels, meat, leaky houses, and a long tail of irrelevant things, such as your choice of programming language at small scale.

At large scale the economic incentives alone are enough to encourage huge energy consumers to use a decent language (for example, Google and C++). But the whole information industry taken together is irrelevant to the global emissions story as long as we have an airline industry, cars, and hamburgers.

US Department of Transporation says the avg. American drives 13.5k miles per year.

Using an average mpg of 21.5 mpg (if the average age of a car is 12 years), this comes to ~628 gallons of gas per year.

EPA uses 33.7 kWh per gallon for ~21,160 kWh in a year. Divide by 360 * 24 and you get 2.5 kW continuous, so it seems plausible.

EU numbers based on [1] come out to ~1 kW for driving?

[1] https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-by-secto...

> 21.5 mpg

this is more than 11L/100 - I don't know anyone who has a car that consumes that much.

The Ford F-150 is the highest-selling vehicle in North America.

Also worth noting - the US gallon is smaller than the UK one. And anecdotally, the mileage rating in the US actually tends to represent real-world consumption, whereas the EU test - until very recently - did not.

Fair - I don't own a car myself, but the US DOT reports 24.4 mpg in 2018 for cars, SUVs, vans, and light trucks shorter than 121 inches. (This is an estimate of vehicles on the road, not 2018 model year.)

If we use a 2020 model year for passenger cars of ~40mpg and a more conservative 11,500 miles per year, it comes out to 1.1kW.

> light trucks shorter than 121 inches.

This definition excludes the best-selling vehicle.

I don’t know if the 4kW statistic is right but 16kWh per day is 0.667kW continuous (16kW / 24 hours).They specifically say not including electricity use but could see that continuous number climbing closer to the 4kW number if it did.

People who regularly fly would also likely quickly make this number rise.

4 kW continuous is 48 kWh per day. 4 kW * 24 h.

My bad, that's much closer.

Umm... I messed up the math. It's 96 kWh. There's enough embarrassment to go around it seems!

Have you ever purchased anything from a store? How did that good get to the store?

Have you ever purchased anything online for home delivery? How did that good get to the delivery center, then your home?

Just because you didn’t pump a gallon of gas into your personally owned tank doesn’t mean it wasn’t burned on your behalf.

but surely that is already accounted for in another budget line right ? if you are just dividing total kwh of a country by households it does not make any sense as it would also count military stuff, etc.

Actually, that's a great example.

The sync client has 10^7 installations or more out there, but its backed by an engineering team of 10^2 or less. Maybe much less.

That scope of impact is fundamental to the economics of software, and its why software engineers have so much potential to do good (or ill) for the environment.

It likely only matters if you're computationally bound. Many (most?) of our uses of computers are IO bound, instead. So some degree of inefficiency in the use of CPUs is probably not as bad as things like the unnecessary round-tripping of data (or constant retrieval) over long distances.

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