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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this might be penny wise and pound foolish.

Hypothetically, if it takes even a single week longer to make code much more efficient and only 20% of that workforce is driving to work, making coffee, running their laptops, etc, do you come out ahead?

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More directly how many cpu hours are needed to be saved to compensate for the carbon footprint of a single SV engineer? I'm guessing that a lot.

The XKCD comic on these needs a separate column for open source.

If thousands of companies are using my library, then there really is a case to be made for making it as efficient as we can within the bounds of maintenance concerns.

I think the multiplier is a good point and adds an interesting dimension to this question.

For example, a SaaS app with mainly one running instance has a really low multiplier vs. a popular open source project.

Unless we have systemic change (e.g., border adjusted carbon tax), anything we try to do as individuals is going to be penny wise and pound foolish. Most of our carbon footprint comes from industry (including transporting goods). Much of that presumably comes from our trade with China both in terms of their lax pollution laws and then transporting goods across the Pacific. None of that is going to change unless we stop pretending that pollution is free, which is to say we need to pass some carbon pricing scheme so that companies have an incentive to reduce the amount of pollution in the goods they sell us. Greener items will inherently be cheaper, and it will give local manufacturing a competitive advantage (bringing back jobs).

Not buying stuff you don't need and the like are measures and individual can take that don't have hidden carbon downsides.

Shaming individuals for consumption confuses the political reality around us. It does nothing to actually bring about material change, and distracts from the real causes. Besides that, its tedious and rude.

But they don't even amount to a rounding error. It might be a big personal sacrifice to give up your SUV or meat or whatever, but you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking you're doing anything for the environment because it's not even a drop in the ocean. It's literally negligible, immeasurable, etc. The only thing we can reasonably do is lobby our legislators for carbon pricing, including giving or volunteering with http://citizensclimatelobby.org.

All of the lifestyle changes we make that give us the warm fuzzies won't make a difference and certainly won't get us where we need to be with respect to global temperature change.

You are right of course, I also don't think that individual action is terribly meaningful. I just wanted to address the "penny wise, pound foolish" part. Fractional pennies can be saved by individuals without expending pounds of carbon elsewhere.

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