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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.