[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.