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Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is not going to gain a lot of traction but just in case anyone ends up here I can't pin down a great source but I've heard / read that the entire IT sector consumes something in the neighborhood of 5-9% of global energy, and that that percentage doesnt have a linear relationship to the expansion of the IT sector.

https://www.enerdata.net/publications/executive-briefing/bet...

The more reliable government resources dont even seem to bother to list IT as a major energy consumer, although its obviously embedded in most / all traditionally recognized sectors.

https://www.enerdata.net/publications/executive-briefing/bet...

I'd love to know more about all this but thats about as far as my late night googling had taken me.

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5-9% seems like a very small amount for something most people use most of the day and gain extreme amounts of value from.

I know right? I'd really like to confirm that number. I first heard it on a Canadian climatology podcast, those people don't make stuff up right?

Airliners account for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions [1], yet we are working to ban passenger air travel to protect the climate. 5-9% is huge in comparison, and we should legislate restrictions on wasteful computing before the climate emergency gets any worse.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

who is working to ban passenger air travel ?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-h...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/business/energy-environme...

https://davidsuzuki.org/living-green/air-travel-climate-chan...

etc.

There is a grassroots campaign for more restrictive legislation on air travel, but it's early there's lots of progress for us to make still.

Who is working to ban passenger air travel? and whom would the ban effect?

We can often easily substitute planes for trains for absolutely massive gains. I don't think there are massive gains to be had for tech. I'm sure someone will show me a post about how C uses a few watts less but its not even close to the gains that can be had elsewhere.

From what I see in companies, probably half of the data and workloads out there are pretty much useless or barely used. At home, I think most of us could do a better job by shutting down everything when we are away.

I wonder if you could create a nuclear powered cruise ship to ferry people cross the Atlantic in two or three days. If you could do that cheaper than a flight I might be interested in that. Air travel is terrible and if you could relax and have your own cabin it could be a really pleasant experience while not producing any travel based emissions.

Half of the world directly use the IT infrastructure every day. How many travel by air once in a year? The number can’t exceed 10%.

Look at how inefficient and harmful for the environment software has become. Devs and corporations are throwing away CPU cycles like it's no big deal when they use large, overly abstracted software tech stacks. You don't need a 3GHz CPU when 500MHz will do the job just as well with greener coding practices. It's time for common sense tech reform in order to protect the environment from this kind of corporate waste.

If we invested all the money it would cost for “greener coding practices” in to public transport we would see absolute massive gains vs an almost unmeasurable gain from the code.

> common sense tech reform

Whatever specific idea you have in mind is either not commonly held, not sensible, or both uncommon and non-sensible. If it was both common and sensible, we’d already be doing it.

My cpu isn't anywhere near the top energy consumer in my house.

You can power datacenters with clean energy, you cannot power airplanes with clean energy (yet).

Not to mention how much IT enables us to avoid using energy! Better routing, just in time manufacturing and storage, teleconferences replacing flights...

The IT industry also uses primarily electric energy which is easier to make green than for example long-range trucking, farming, or long-distance flights.

That's 5-9% of global electricity, not global energy. Electricity is only about 15% of global energy use making IT around 1% of total energy.

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