| It's interesting to run some numbers here. Say you're a software company that's totally dedicated to removing CO2 from the atmosphere: you run a business, but that's just to fund your CO2 reduction efforts. Should you rewrite your python code in C? Sure, it'll reduce your carbon footprint, but it'll deduct from your profits, which directly reduce atmospheric CO2. I'm trying to compute the best case scenario for a rewrite here, and I've tried to err in that direction whenever possible.
US power consumption in 2015 was 4,144.3 TWh, and CO2 production in 2016 (presumably higher than 2015) was 1821 Tg. Electricity costs in Oaklahoma (cheapest state in the US according to [0]) are 6.8c/kWh I'm assuming that you're reducing CO2 by buying carbon offsets: if you have a better way, that makes the case for a rewrite weaker. Poking around a bit leads me to [1], and taking one of the higher values on that page gives me $15/ton (assuming imperial to favor a rewrite). Multiplying all that out give me that for every $100 spent on electricity, you need to spend an additional $10 to cancel it out. That's... something. But of course, datacenters don't spend all their money on electricity: one of the higher figures I could find [2] gives me 20%. On the other hand, the rest of the datacenter generates CO2 as well. I found tracking down datacenter-specific data really hard here. The CO2 impact of computers is mostly in manufacturing, for example [3]. On the other hand, servers see much more use than a typical consumer box, which complicates things. Ideally we'd break down the CO2 emissions for each component of the datacenter. But that seems hard, so let's instead assume the rest of the datacenter produces as much CO2/dollar as the electricity does. This seems really high: utilities as a whole make up 1.6% of the US GDP[4] but account for 29% of the US's CO2 output[5]. Still, even with that assumption, your datacenter externalities are 10%. If you're right on the borderline here, then maybe that's enough to push you to do the rewrite. But the mantra that "computers are cheap, developers are expensive" still holds when you take externalities into account. Now of course, most companies don't exist to reduce atmospheric CO2. But if you're going to exhort a company to reduce CO2, it's almost certainly cheaper for them (or more effective for you, depending on how you look at it) to just buy carbon offsets then rewrite all their python in <faster language here>. [0] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ [1] https://www.carbonfootprint.com/offset.aspx?o=1 [2] http://www.linuxlabs.com/PDF/Data%20Center%20Cost%20of%20Own... [3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652611... [4] https://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=51&step=1#reqid=... [5] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... |