[callmeal]

>If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted.

You can configure your server to sleep (scheduled or use WoL), which will halve (or more) that carbon emission number.

Speaking of which, individual action will never approach the level that corporate action could. Take a look at the practice of gas flaring (2022 estimate of ~357 million tons CO2) which is about ~45kg/person on earth. Changing flaring to capture will have a bigger impact than a minisucle fraction of the population not running a server.

But profits trump everything, so I guess we're stuck shaming individuals instead.

[matthiasb]

Turning a service on/off makes a lot of sense for this kind of application.

I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.

Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.

https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...

[callmeal]

> See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.

Wow, I didn't realize there were so many datacenters. My comment about corporate action still stands though - there's no reason why companies running those data centers cannot switch to renewable sources for even a portion of their usage.

I'm no fanboy but I was impressed to see how Apple's office is 100% powered by solar (75% through rooftop, rest through an offsite farm) :

https://www.solar.com/learn/apples-new-campus-country-larges...

    According to Renewable Energy World, the campus will run entirely on renewable energy. It will generate 17 megawatts (MW) of solar on rooftops and also be supplemented by 4 megawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells. They’re hoping that this onsite generation will cover around 75% of power requirements during working hours. The remaining energy needed will be supplied by a 130-megawatt off-site solar farm in Monterey County.

[matthiasb]

Most cloud providers already claim being carbon neutral for EU and US regions. Unfortunately, there is a lot of waste there too, so there goes the little bit of green energy we have.

[drsnow]

I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity. Do people just lack the self awareness to realize their inaction is tantamount to malice?

[yard2010]

Do you not understand your power and actions are so little next to these corporates to the point that it really doesn't matter? The other day I thought maybe me and my gf should merge our facebook account, you know, to save up space in facebook

[andrepd]

It's not defeatist or nihilist, it's understanding that policy and law (or an individual CEO's or politician's choice) has orders of magnitude more impact that individual actions.

[autoexec]

> I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity.

The attitude of "here's a simple step that will cut down your individual carbon emissions, and also please pay attention to the primary sources of the problem"? Because that attitude doesn't seem defeatist or nihilistic at all? I don't think the "profits trump everything" comment was an endorsement of that philosophy.

If I misunderstood, and you were talking about the people hiding behind the companies and industries who are destroying the environment so that they can enrich themselves at everyone's expense then I'd guess that those folks are entirely self-aware and simply don't care that they act out of malice.

It seems like they're willing to hurt anyone and destroy anything if it might grant them a little more money. I wish people would start seeing them for the threat that they are, and spent a lot more of their time thinking about what should be done about those kinds of psychopaths instead of spinning their wheels worrying about how long their computer stays awake.

inaction is bad, but wasted and misdirected action can be every bit as harmful. Focusing on the people who are consistently doing the most harm in the shortest amount of time is only logical unless people have become too defeatist to believe that anything can be done to stop the abuses of industry.

[tourmalinetaco]

So you support Bill Gates creating an uncountable amount of CO2 with his inefficient OS (not to mention ewaste from CPU limiting), but a single individual running their server for a few hours longer than you like is “tantamount to malice”? Do you even care about Earth, or do you just care about reciting capitalist talking points?

[newsclues]

Lots of money promoting climate change. Look at the anti-natalist movement.

There is a lot of money trying to nerf the world and reduce the population.