[frashelaw]

Westerners really will do literally anything about climate change except reckon with their corporate overlords who by far are the biggest contributors to climate destruction.

Get real, your app using 15% less power makes literally zero difference. If you want to make a real difference, nationalize and seize energy corporations and whip them into shape under planned economic management. Anything short of that and climate disaster is inevitable.

But of course, they will never do that.

[JoeAltmaier]

Yes, its astounding how much energy is used by industry. I was involved in a sad industrial energy debacle, at a job long ago.

We were making electric arc furnace controllers. An electric arc furnace is commonly used to recycle metal. Think of large pencil leads (size of your thigh) stuck through an insulated lid over a large vat of old bicycles, water softeners, bedframes etc - recycled metal. By creating an arc between the three phases of the electrodes and the pile of metal and controlling the current and length of the arc, considerable energy can be transferred to the metal as heat. Pretty efficient.

Out beta test site complained that they'd be running a shift and notice the arc was misbehaving every morning - failing to moderate the arc length properly. Resulting in most of the energy going into the electrodes and eroding them away. What was going on?

By having an engineer sit there on an overnight shift, we discovered that the desktop computer running the algorithm was going into 'power save' mode, stopping the app from responding to inputs and leaving the furnace electrodes stalled.

We estimated that this 30MW furnace wasted as much energy over the week, as 'power save' mode on PCs saved in all of America for a year.

Think about it. It would have been better if Microsoft had never invented Power Save mode. More electricity would have been saved that year.

That's how much industrial power matters, and how little your app matters.

[ssivark]

This incident is an interesting example of the general under-appreciation of systems thinking and the impact of tail events. Amazing/crazy!

[maccard]

> Westerners really will do literally anything about climate change except reckon with their corporate overlords who by far are the biggest contributors to climate destruction.

Disagree. Westerners will do literally anything except make any changes to their behavior. You even see it here whenever these threads come up - "why should I do anything while china is emitting X times more than the US".

These companies don't exist in a vacuum. BP aren't pumping up oil and hoping that an evil megacorp will just buy it. People like you and me are driving the demand for products with huge amounts of waste and dirty manufacturing processes.

Sure, for a random web app with 30 users a small increase in efficiency is likely meaningless, but if that improvement is in a server side framework widely deployed on AWS, that has the potential to save tonnes of carbon

These tools can also be used by said megacorps for scheduling. Personally, I would love it if we could hook into an API in aws that says "hey, demand is low right now and we have wind power to spare, do you want to run your nightly CI build now?"

[beckman466]

> These companies don't exist in a vacuum. BP aren't pumping up oil and hoping that an evil megacorp will just buy it. People like you and me are driving the demand for products with huge amounts of waste and dirty manufacturing processes.

Oil companies like BP and Shell blocked the dissemination of vital scientific research on climate change. They also blocked the development of electric cars, or alternatives in general. [1] Executives in the car industry also hold back the development of high speed rail networks through lobbying.

> Westerners will do literally anything except make any changes to their behavior.

It's hard for the working class to see the full picture when we live in a proprietary, black box -world that only allows a small group of people to become science literate. A society where the propertied class undemocratically charts the direction for science through 'intellectual property' claims, which blocks scientific progress as it commoditizes and removes important feedback loops/learnings from the commons. [2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/vimeo-210171457

[2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[globular-toast]

> Oil companies like BP and Shell blocked the dissemination of vital scientific research on climate change.

I was taught about global warming as a child at school in the 90s. Are we going to keep blaming it on suppression of information for another 30 years?

> They also blocked the development of electric cars, or alternatives in general.

Electric cars don't solve any problems apart from reduce pollution in cities maybe. The change that is required includes not using 2 tonne vehicles to move around everywhere. Electric cars are just another example of people refusing to change their behaviour.

> It's hard for the working class to see the full picture when we live in a proprietary, black box -world that only allows a small group of people to become science literate.

There has never been a better time in history for finding information or becoming scientifically literate. I'm not sure what you're talking about here.

But none of this will help us anyway. Capitalism keeps us divided and divided we will fall. There's simply no way that any large-scale change is going to happen without coordinated, top-down, systematic enforcement from governments. We need to make people realise that we're all in this together. But this isn't how animal brains operate, unfortunately.

[pjc50]

Last time the Mossmorran flare went off ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt/mossmorran-fl... ), I ran the numbers and estimated that it was consuming as much ethylene as one hundred plastic straws per second. I can't out-conserve a hundred foot high column of flame.

Individual behaviour is the weakest of possible pressures on inefficient processes. And as you point out it's a collective action problem - people aren't going to be the only one changing their behavior, that's obviously ineffective, they want a behavior change to be coerced on everyone at the same time so there aren't any free riders.

Largely it's a "yes and" situation; we have to push for everything, because we'll only get a tiny fraction of the changes we ask for.

[ZeroGravitas]

I agree with your general point, I just want to note one of my pet peeves, which is people talking about the straw thing as if it was ever intended to do anything but reduce discarded single use plastic items.

The framing if it not being a useful contribution to climate change appears to be used to undermine people's confidence that anything can be done about anything.

But we can and are making progress on plastic litter going into oceans and carbon intensity generally. Very slow progress in some cases but still, its not hopeless or impossible.

And yes, generally we should do the most impactful things first, and we generally are. Most of the eco "whataboutism" seems designed to derail rather than illuminate.

[lozenge]

It's used to let governments that aren't interested in being green, look green.

Here in the UK it's a slow drip of initiatives that catch the public eye. Microplastics, single use bags, straws, now they're looking at coffee stirrers, and bags again as the law had an obvious unintended consequence. I just know the next things will be plastic plates and some absurdly overcomplicated deposit scheme.

They'll also ban new ICE cars which will have a clear unintended consequence in driving people to upgrade their cars early for their "last ICE car", creating more manufacturing emissions. But it sounds good.

The "big stuff" goes ignored, in fact our current PM is contemptuous of the environment. There isn't going to be any action on meat, aviation... actually they're building new runways.

It's as if we are asking for work life balance and we get given our birthdays off. All PR and no actual progress.

[ZeroGravitas]

That API exists btw.

https://www.watttime.org/api-documentation/#introduction

There's other local ones too.

[maccard]

TIL. That's really cool!

[eigenhombre]

Yes, many of us work at those companies. At my job we have what I would guess is a "medium" sized build-out in AWS. I asked our AWS support rep for tools to measure carbon impact -- ideally Cloudwatch metrics for type and amount of power consumed by an AWS resource. He said he'd pass it along (this was a couple years ago).

When we do clean house (e.g., destroying unneeded services/environments) it's largely based on reducing cost and complexity -- but cost is still a very poor proxy for low carbon.

I really like your "show me wind power to spare" API also.

[xyzelement]

>> nationalize and seize energy corporations and whip them into shape under planned economic management.

Can you imagine not being able to heat your apartment/home, or your stores being empty because there's no fuel for trucks? Unless you can really picture that and still tell yourself "yup, I really do want that," you shouldn't be excited/confident about what you're proposing.

I suspect you can't really imagine what it's like to lack fuel that powers your necessities, but I grew up in the USSR in 1980s and I can tell you it's not good.

[pjc50]

> Can you imagine not being able to heat your apartment/home

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/13/almost-40000...

> your stores being empty because there's no fuel for trucks?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2021/sep/29/uk-pet...

OK, OK, this is a cheap shot and nowhere near as bad as it was in the Soviet Union, but the point is that the involvement of government in energy provision is kind of unavoidable and you can suffer supply and delivery crises under any system.

I'm just about old enough to have been a child when the UK utilities were privatized, along with rail, telecomms and everything else. What this means is that instead of having a single state-owned inaccessible monolith providing bad service, you have a single investor-owned private monolith providing bad service and returning profits to investors. (BT Openreach, Railtrack, National Grid Plc).

Even weirder is having foreign state owned companies in a ""competitive"" ""market"", such as DB or EDF.

I don't think nationalization is the solution on its own though, because what's needed is better policy. Nationalizing things into an incompetent state, which we are currently experiencing in the UK, will just make them worse.

[KronisLV]

> Can you imagine not being able to heat your apartment/home, or your stores being empty because there's no fuel for trucks? Unless you can really picture that and still tell yourself "yup, I really do want that," you shouldn't be excited/confident about what you're proposing.

This seems like an exaggeration. If anything, compare the current CO2 emissions per capita by country to get a better picture of how things would be in reality: https://i.redd.it/mnt8im0yvvd41.png

It'd probably be a shift in your standard of living, for example when going from the situation in the US (16.5 tonnes of CO2 per capita) to the situation in the UK (5.7 tonnes of CO2 per capita). I wouldn't say that the people in the UK have empty stores, but they definitely have a less rampant disregard for the environment while chasing profit margins.

In practice, if you wanted to be more environmentally friendly, you'd drive a hatchback instead of a SUV or would use public transportation, would live in an apartment building instead of having your own house, would eat meat once a week instead of once a day, would have a new phone and computer every 5 years instead of every year, as well as would do all of the other things that responsible people should do, including exercising your rights within a democratic government. That also seems to be working out great for the Scandinavian countries.

But the most important thing - you'd stop having so many kids and would lower your population density, on the path to which most European countries are already on. On an unrelated note, where i live (Latvia), heating my house is a matter of fetching some firewood and lighting the furnace: that way central heating takes care of making the rooms warm for everyone who lives in the house, while i can also use the furnace for making bread or anything else.

Sources for the visualization:

  [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ew2sn7/per_capita_co2_emissions_by_country_oc/
  [1] https://www.icos-cp.eu/science-and-impact/global-carbon-budget/2019
  [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

[xyzelement]

> you'd stop having so many kids and would lower your population density, on the path to which most European countries are already on

You make it sound like you believe this is a good thing while people who are actually experiencing population decline are not having a good time.

Whether it's countries like Japan and Russia desperately trying to encourage births, China lifting its one-child policy, villages in Italy paying people to move there, desolate post-industrial towns in the US rotting, etc - everything points to population decline as a strictly terrible thing.

Like you, I was also born in Latvia. In 1980s, the country had 2.6 million people. Today, something like 1.9 million - 27% decline in 40 years. You may celebrate this from the CO2 point of view but I think the more obvious interpretation of these numbers is "Latvia is dying." It saddens me to see this. I am not sure whether the land will just be empty or it will be populated by people from cultures who have not reduced their children (history suggests the latter) but - are you sure this is what you want?

Also, taken to the extreme, your logic suggests not just reducing kids, but mass suicide/homicide. After all, if we care about CO2 above all else, why wait a generation for the number of "emitters" to decline, when we can just solve the problem today?

None of this is to say that reducing emissions isn't important and there are a ton of great ways to do that (new energy sources, reduced commuting through better and better communication tools) coming on-line that I am really excited about. But destroying future generations to move this metric doesn't seem right to me.

[KronisLV]

> You make it sound like you believe this is a good thing while people who are actually experiencing population decline are not having a good time.

It can be a good thing for managing emissions and the entire planet not becoming inhospitable, while at the same time being a bad thing for people in these societies in the short term.

Demographic transition phases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition) are inevitable - growth cannot continue forever with limited resources and it therefore makes sense to put social mechanisms in place to cope with a significant part of the population aging at any given time.

The fact that this is not the case is simply a failure in choosing the right priorities as a society, not some absolute truth. If anything, you should be asking where your tax money goes and whether there's enough to take care of the elderly that have worked their entire lives in the service of the country, instead of that responsibility being passed down to their kids.

> You may celebrate this from the CO2 point of view but I think the more obvious interpretation of these numbers is "Latvia is dying." It saddens me to see this.

While i share this emotion, there are cities out there that have larger populations than this entire country. I agree that the history of cultures should be preserved, but certain osmosis and naturalization of other cultural elements is inevitable in all but the most xenophobic and isolationist societies. That's not a bad thing.

Countries and cultures dying out, or becoming a part of something larger (e.g. a mix of the Baltic cultures, for example) is completely natural, regardless of how any single person might feel about it - though it also takes place over hundreds or even thousands of years, so there's no need to worry about what will happen in your lifetime in that regard. What do countries even matter, if we're all stuck on this rock together?

> Also, taken to the extreme, your logic suggests not just reducing kids, but mass suicide/homicide.

This is a strawman that feels dishonest and that i will not engage. While the argument is "technically true", it's also one of those that are insane enough not to warrant further consideration.

Rather than nitpicking, it instead makes way more sense to simply live a responsible life yourself, because you didn't choose to be brought into this world, and to consider when and whether you can afford the large amount of resources that are necessary to have a child or even many. You don't need to be a nihilist to be responsible.

Then again, i do believe that many of the people who should give this a thought don't and therefore have to support the large families of their own making, that they oftentimes cannot, all at the expense of not only society, but also the quality of life that their kids have.

Thus, moderation is probably for the better in life in most cases, as is introspection. Don't bring too many kids into this world if you cannot take good care of them. Don't bring too many kids into this world if the fact of them existing is likely to make things worse environmentally/otherwise. If you do bring kids into this world, be the best parent that you can be and teach them all that you can. Never make babies just because that's what your biology tells you to do, or what society expects you to do.

It's not like you can't be a parent at all, though. And that's hardly destroying the future generations.

You can't assume the amount of people on the planet as some sort of a proxy for well being, by that logic life was 2x worse in the 1960s: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

The economic drives for persistent growth are of our own making, nothing more.

[lelandfe]

> You can't assume the amount of people on the planet as some sort of a proxy for well being, by that logic life was 2x worse in the 1960s

I know this isn't quite what you were getting at, but child mortality rate is commonly a proxy for well being, is a major factor in the global population increase, and was >4.5x higher in 1960: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-child-mortality-ti...

So, in some sense of it, population size is a proxy for well being (at least for now).

[KronisLV]

> So, in some sense of it, population size is a proxy for well being (at least for now).

It is only a proxy for as long as you ignore the last stages of demographic transition or haven't reached them - because in most countries with good health care and safe living conditions, the populations eventually stall or even decline, even though the quality of life doesn't necessarily have to (in lieu of bad political decisions being made).

That said, i do believe that child mortality is probably a more accurate indicator in that regard, since that would be directly correlated to how good the healthcare is and would remain low in the later stages.

[mushbino]

You're doing the equivalent of pointing to Liberia as an example of why privatization is bad. Nationalization has been working out pretty well for China and if we really want to tackle climate change we need collective action. It's the only way

[ceejayoz]

> Can you imagine not being able to heat your apartment/home, or your stores being empty because there's no fuel for trucks?

If these are disqualifying, capitalism's out too.

Heat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

Empty stores via fuel shortage: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/brexit-fuel-food-sho...

[bserge]

Oh yeah, and having a union for workers automatically means the country has gone communist. /s

[adreamingsoul]

How is “nationalising energy” anything similar to the socialist state of the USSR?

[perceptronas]

Grandparent mentioned "planned economy" + "nationalizing energy" which is a fair comparison to USSR as it was illegal to have private companies there and economy was planned in great detail

[anonporridge]

To be fair, westerners are cutting down their reproduction below replacement rate. That's far and away the most impactful thing you can do to cut your personal contribution to carbon emissions.

But yeah, fretting about energy efficiency on the margins is a waste of time and cognitive effort. The world economy and travel largely shut down last year and it barely made a dent in global emissions.

Our choice is rapidly decarbonize energy production and figure out carbon capture or bust.

[maccard]

The only reason the reproduction rate matters so much in the west is because of the impact of each individual person. If we systemically reduced the CO2 per Capita by half, having as many children wouldn't be a problem. There are many other things you can do that have a massive impact; things that are magnified you have any kids, like eating meat weekly instead of 2x per day, or turning down your home thermostat. On an individual and a population level just those two changes can have enormous effects

[faeriechangling]

...then the westerners turn around and replace their population with immigrants to maintain their standard of living, whom in turn must waste as much power as the local population to be competitive and have a similar standard of living, and whom send remittances to their home countries, in which the reproduction happens. Outsourcing reproduction to other countries doesn't stop pollution any more than outsourcing industry to China means that the west isn't polluting, because in both cases it's western demand for goods and labour driving the engine forwards.

If you want a model of a country with falling emissions, look at Japan, which is actually dropping in population without merely outsourcing reproduction. The western model will never cause emissions to drop, because the point isn't to cause emissions to drop, the point is to maximize gdp growth and standard of living in the medium term, which is a goal that all but guarantees emissions growth. Get ahead now because if we don't, somebody else will, and then we'll be behind when global warming does everybody in!

[matheusmoreira]

> That's far and away the most impactful thing you can do to cut your personal contribution to carbon emissions.

Yeah, and it's also the fastest way to put an end to your nation. Without people, there's no nation.

[sodality2]

>reckon with their corporate overlords

>nationalize and seize energy corporations and whip them into shape under planned economic management

Genuinely asking, do you think this is an option anyone has? I firmly believe that over 50% of the country could want to do this and it STILL wouldn't be done.

[frashelaw]

As I briefly alluded to, the liberal democratic capitalist economic and political organization of western society, along with Anglo cultural notions of individualism in general, are entirely antithetical to addressing climate crisis, which requires long term coordination and economic planning, not the profit driven hawkery of the "free" market. And extreme individualism feeds into making this level of coordination completely politically untenable in the west. Just look how much people rage against lockdowns and public health mandates as millions die from the pandemic.

The crisis likely will be eventually addressed, but it will be by the successors of liberal democracy, and the multipolar world consisting of the post-capitalist, post-US-hegemony third world.

[mopsi]

I suggest you to read up on how the alternatives to free-market capitalism have performed in environmental protection before pinning your hopes on them.

I was born and lived in the USSR. Since everything was state-owned and natural resources were allocated, not bought and sold and taxed, there was no incentive to use them efficiently. The result was horrible pollution everywhere, the like we see in modern-day China.

The famous commie blocks, for example, had no insulation nor ventilation to speak of. Instead, everyone were expected to keep a small window[1] open (even in winter) to ventilate, and the tremendous heat loss was compensated by 30-50% higher fuel consumption. Since it didn't have a price tag, wastage wasn't an issue. You couldn't save money by insulationg your home, because heating prices were artificial and unrelated to consumption. No-one else in the chain had any incentive to improve anything either, because that wouldn't have improved profit margins or anything else of that sort. Their wages were also fixed and unrelated to performance.

Eventually this led to environmental revolt, which was one of the drivers of USSR's collapse. Chernobyl and its coverup played a vital part in general disillusionment. The country was turning into an industrial wasteland before everyone's eyes.

Go ahead, do the same. Give Exxon oil fields for free, force people to work for them at artificial and undervalued wages[2], abolish pollution and all other taxes, close all competing oil companies[3], and jail every critic of your plan[4]. Surely that will work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortochka

[2] It was a crime to be unemployed. People were assigned to jobs when they finished school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)

[3] Motherland needs only one.

[4] They must be insane to doubt you. Lock them up in a mental hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...

[generj]

There were other USSR environmental disasters too like the Aral Sea. Clearly neither unrestrained capitalism or total public ownership of the environment are viable.

Thankfully we have a third way, mixed economies that internalize externalities so that people and firms are incentivized to make correct environmental decisions. There’s a reason nearly every economist favors Pigovian solutions like carbon taxes for the environment. Governments can apply the same rules to themselves.

Companies are just centrally planned governments that haven’t reached scale yet. We heap scorn on Five Year Plans when governments do them, but firms (especially in limited competition) create five year plans all the time, sometimes with just as disastrous results as Mao.

[jamil7]

Why can’t we do both? 15% less energy use for our software, scaled up actually sounds like a pretty big win. Less charge cycles also means a battery lasts longer before needing to be replaced.

If programmers have the tools to easily profile and fix low-hanging fruit in this area it’s a positive to society.

[mytailorisrich]

I agree with you that "your app using 15% less power" is not a priority and that governments should be more involved. However, "nationalizing and seizing energy corporations " makes no difference, either.

What is your aim for the energy sector here?

To decarbonise it requires a lot of capital investment and innovation and it's only pragmatic to involve the private sector through the right incentives (both carrot and stick). It's also pragmatic to involve the state because private companies are not very good at projects that require high capital investments for very long term goals (for example, developing and building nuclear plants).

[notafraudster]

I agree with the broader point -- there should be real legal and regulatory action, including things that many people find verboten like expropriation and nationalization, in the transportation, energy production, and food production sectors.

But I don't see the need to poo-poo this. Think of a complex multifaceted problem as a 2x2 square, where one axis is difficulty and the other axis is impact. I think it's very reasonable to defend a strategy that tackles high difficulty high impact problems + low difficulty problems regardless of impact, just because it creates a steady cadence of incremental wins, which are energizing.

[lksewpnseiq]

huh? This doesn't really have anything to do with climate change. Energy consumption is an important software performance metric, measuring it is the first step to optimizing that aspect of the software. Normally this sort of thing is done with low power microcontrollers, this article is just talking about techniques applicable to higher level systems.

[wmf]

This blog post is part of a "green software" movement that's trying to guilt-trip programmers for wasting energy.

[owlbite]

I mean, don't do it for the "green". Do it for longer battery life for your users.

[toast0]

You don't even need to care about your users' batteries. Do it so your battery usage is less than other apps, so your users don't delete your app because it uses too much battery. (This is the same reason you need to optimize your app size, although remove app can sort by size and not battery use, AFAIK)

[frashelaw]

Precisely.

[o_m]

The only way we can do that is by voting for political parties that have climate policies, or do a coup. Neither can be done by one person. Making sure software used by many use less energy, can be done by a single developer.

[ZeroGravitas]

I like your enthusiasm, but I feel simple regulation should achieve most of these benefits. Yeah it would be good to move faster, but nationalising isn't strictly necessary, and the planning already happens for most things anyway and is already in place for most things.

I agree that most of the resistance is financed by powerful corporates who don't want to be regulated and nationalisation is one way to cut that Gordian knot, but not the only one.

[power_throw]

It takes 1700kwh to manufacture one laptop, or 17,000 charging cycles. No, "westerners" have absolutely no idea of what is the problem.

[rapnie]

> Get real, your app using 15% less power makes literally zero difference.

Unless this is flamebait, it is wrong. I see this argument in countless different incantations. Sure, our 'corporate overlords' in all compass directions play an oversized role in compounding our problems, and we should go all-in to force them to improve their ways. In addition to that all our small collective actions matter just as well. They compound too. If you want to tackle wicked problems, there's no single one solution and a multi-pronged approach is needed.

[amelius]

> But of course, they will never do that.

Perhaps you can find a better way than venting your frustrations in an echo chamber.

[jazzyjackson]

are easterners doing something different?

[bserge]

Not telling everyone else what they should do (while not following their own advice), at least for now.

[dragonelite]

Not comparable most if not all of Asia is a developing region. Maybe the western allied oil and gas nations in the west Asia and Singapore, Korea and Japan in the east Asia could be qualified as developed nations the rest is still in development.

The only big example is China that puts resources in innovating their way into a carbon neutral economy in 2060 and making sure they peak at around 2030. That because the Chinese citizens demand a better environment and blue skies and their governments actually listens and creates plans.

[wmf]

China's doing some crazy stuff like shutting down factories by fiat but it's not necessarily better.

[bserge]

What are energy companies doing that's worth nationalizing them over? Whip into shape how? They're energy providers, not users.

[gpvos]

They are still investing into fossil fuels instead of sustainable production methods.

[detaro]

And many governments are happily subsidizing fossil fuels.

[matheusmoreira]

Westerners will also never stop trading with China, the biggest polluters in the world.

[globular-toast]

Or the USA, whose per capita emissions are still double that of China.

[kingkawn]

Never say never