There was a talk by Hennessy and Patterson, winners of the 2017 Turing Award (I forget which one, it might have been their Turing Award lecture), where they sai

There was a talk by Hennessy and Patterson, winners of the 2017 Turing Award (I forget which one, it might have been their Turing Award lecture), where they said basically: software engineers are not good as solving performance problems, all the big improvements are really done at the hardware level. I wonder if something similar applies here. We can certainly improve things in a number of small ways through better software, and when we can we should. Is that what's really going to fix the problem? Or will the problem really only be solved by having efficient energy cell storage coupled with non-carbon based energy sources meaning that large server farms produce no pollution? Not fundamentally changing one's behavior other than using 40kb files instead of 80kb files for sending memes to one's friends seems like it's more there for one to not feel bad about one's self for not having solved the problem.