5 ms·

> 1/10 or 1/100 the carbon footprint I feel compelled to bring this article up, especially since last time it was brought up on HN people seemed sure in the co

by jchw 6y ago

> 1/10 or 1/100 the carbon footprint I feel compelled to bring this article up, especially since last time it was brought up on HN people seemed sure in the comments that it was not a common sentiment. https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/no-your-clean-code-wont-save-the-planet/ https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/no-your-clean-c... I agree with the gist of this article, but I think if you are not a FAANG as the article suggests, then you probably also are not at a scale where your carbon impact is actually measurable...

mlyle 6y ago
> I agree with the gist of this article, but I think if you are not a FAANG as the article suggests, then you probably also are not at a scale where your carbon impact is actually measurable... It's not hard to have a startup that does use 100kW of servers and maybe about 150kW total-- HVAC, networking, UPS inefficiencies, etc. There's about 450 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour from typical electrical generation. Therefore this is about 600 tonnes of CO2-- not counting other lifecycle costs. On the one hand, this is a tiny smidgen of overall CO2 emissions. On the other hand, this is about 80 households worth of CO2 emissions. As a developer, making this kind of thing 1% more efficient is the same magnitude as completely eliminating your home carbon footprint, and is a whole hell of a lot more plausible to do. I know offsets are "cheap" at $10 per tonne or whatever as the article says. On the other hand, please don't really assume that buying $6k of offsets really does as much good as eliminating 600 tonnes of emissions for realsies.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  A startup that cares at all about energy efficiency of compute will use a public cloud service. They don't have inefficient (or any) UPS, some of them don't even have traditional HVAC, their power overheads are only about 10% compared to 100-300% for standard corporate datacenters, and whatever fixed overhead they suffer is amortized over all their customers.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    OK, uh... Slice 25% off the numbers I said, which assumed an overhead of 50% instead of your suggested 10%. It doesn't change the point at all.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    While public clouds do a great job at optimized hardware designs, they do an abysmal job of keeping all the CPU's and disks utilised. A typical CPU in a cloud datacenter is maybe only 10% utilised. That's mostly due to unsold capacity and poor bin packing on many levels (user has an oversized kube cluster, the cloud provider has spare machines, etc.). Many cloud machines just sit idle for years on end because someone has forgotten about them. In many cases, those idle resources are not used for lower priority jobs either, since they are being paid for by a customer.
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      The proper comparison isn't to how much utilization they could get if they were theoretically perfect. You need to compare to the realistic alternatives. If you are running your own servers, you are probably utilizing an even lower percentage most of the time.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Not sure I can entirely agree. If you use for example a cloud machine service for your application (e.g. GCE) but you refer to a hosted database (Cloud Bigtable) then you are exploiting a service that is packed into the rest of Google's junk with very high utilization. You could also skip the machine reservation and get better utilization by using GAE or similar.
      - repsilat 6y ago
        > packed into the rest of Google's junk with very high utilization. Maybe packed in with other public cloud things? I thought the partitioning between public and private resources was done at a pretty coarse level, but might misremember. IMO more relevant is that Google public cloud resources are carbon neutral, at least wrt electricity. (Through buying green power and emissions credits, to the degree you believe the prices and the models I guess.)
- YmiYugy 6y ago
  A quick internet research reveals that the social cost per emitted ton of CO2 is most certainly much higher than $10. Estimates are around $140-$180 with many being much higher.
QuadrupleA 6y ago
OP here, thanks for the link - interesting to see this stuff translated into real kilowatt terms. I haven't followed the discussions much around server carbon footprints but agreed, for a small app you're not gonna save the earth by shaving 2 watts a day down to 0.2 watts or whatever. There's definitely some scale at which optimization makes a meaningful dent, would be interesting to study that more.
faitswulff 6y ago
...unless you’re a blockchain startup.
godelski 6y ago
I'm not sure this adds up. If it is a trivial change, why not do it? 100Kg is 100Kg. That's like seeing a dollar bill sitting on the ground and not picking it up. No effort. But it is something everyone can do as well. As a parallel let's look at diets[0] (independent gives higher numbers[1]). Lots of people reduce their meat intake to reduce their personal carbon footprint. But the average diet is about 2000 kgCO2eq/yr (3000 via Independent). A vegetarian diet is about 1200kg and a vegan is around 250kg (potentially dubious claim but it is for sure less than a mean and less than a vegetarian diet). 10 websites changing to local fonts is like a single person changing to a vegetarian diet. The logic here is that you could $20-$30/yr and completely eliminate your dietary footprint, which is much easier than changing diets. So are what these people doing useless? No. It helps because the aggregate. It helps because it makes people conscious of the problem and how their choices affect the world. But yeah, big corporations should be doing more, but without them doing something that doesn't mean you should give up and do nothing. [0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much-would-giving-up-meat-help-the-environment https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/climate-change-carbon-emissions-family-household-flights-vegan-a9203096.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/climate-change-carbon-e...
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Considering the pandemic I think about $10 is the threshold I’d be willing to pick up. But I also probably wouldn’t pick it up on principle so the person who dropped it could come back and get it. I don’t know how to extend your analogy to account for my process though.
mehrdadn 6y ago
> Plugging the numbers in the Internet then emits 180 billion kilograms of CO2. So the author, by switching to local fonts, reduced the carbon emissions of the Internet by 0.000000056%. There ~7.8 billion people on the planet. If you vote (let's say everyone votes for the sake of the argument), you're increasing the percentage of people voting by ~0.0000000128%. This change is just as "meaningless" as that one, so... don't go vote?
- kortilla 6y ago
  There is no global election. But even if there was, the trade-off is do you do this stupid thing that gets a tiny vote or do you do something that’s 1000x more effective. At some point you need to stop focusing on stupid shit when planting a tree does far more.
other_herbert 6y ago
Our product isn't at that scale, but because of the way our hosting environment is set up we have typically 8 machines at 3% usage over a week... Some of this is pushing back against the desire by management or others in your group to seem larger than really necessary... I guess I'm saying part of pushing back against waste is taking care of both sides... I know if I tried to get our people to shut down half of our current infrastructure people (who have no real knowledge of any actual load numbers) would never allow that... So much political nonsense... It's been a long week :)
m0zg 6y ago
It is very easily measurable. In fact many rack UPS units (such as 2.2KW APC ones I use in my garage) even compute the carbon fooprint for you in their management web UI in pounds of CO2. The numbers can be surprisingly high, actually, even if you just have a few servers.
ineedasername 6y ago
Well, if it's easy to cut down a bit without incurring other costs that might have still other CO2 implications, then why not? If most people make the effort, then the aggregate will add up to more than a FAANG, so a social push for it isn't a waste. Sure, don't expect to change the world on it alone. But if every industry takes on an awareness of this sort of thing, and each niche within an industry discovers some way to shave a fraction of % off it's emissions, it will all add up significantly. Doing this kinds of thing is always going to be a game of inches, not miles. We can't say "It won't even get us a mile, why should we bother?" Be realistic about it by all means, but take the easy inches when they present themselve.
hinkley 6y ago
As the link argues, you have to look at the utility (value) of the website. When a phone call or checking the website stops me driving across town, that's 100 WH - half a gallon of gas + wear and tear. If a review stops me from buying the wrong product, what's the footprint of that?

by jchw 6y ago

mlyle 6y ago

> I agree with the gist of this article, but I think if you are not a FAANG as the article suggests, then you probably also are not at a scale where your carbon impact is actually measurable... It's not hard to have a startup that does use 100kW of servers and maybe about 150kW total-- HVAC, networking, UPS inefficiencies, etc. There's about 450 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour from typical electrical generation. Therefore this is about 600 tonnes of CO2-- not counting other lifecycle costs. On the one hand, this is a tiny smidgen of overall CO2 emissions. On the other hand, this is about 80 households worth of CO2 emissions. As a developer, making this kind of thing 1% more efficient is the same magnitude as completely eliminating your home carbon footprint, and is a whole hell of a lot more plausible to do. I know offsets are "cheap" at $10 per tonne or whatever as the article says. On the other hand, please don't really assume that buying $6k of offsets really does as much good as eliminating 600 tonnes of emissions for realsies.

jeffbee 6y ago
A startup that cares at all about energy efficiency of compute will use a public cloud service. They don't have inefficient (or any) UPS, some of them don't even have traditional HVAC, their power overheads are only about 10% compared to 100-300% for standard corporate datacenters, and whatever fixed overhead they suffer is amortized over all their customers.
- mlyle 6y ago
  OK, uh... Slice 25% off the numbers I said, which assumed an overhead of 50% instead of your suggested 10%. It doesn't change the point at all.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  While public clouds do a great job at optimized hardware designs, they do an abysmal job of keeping all the CPU's and disks utilised. A typical CPU in a cloud datacenter is maybe only 10% utilised. That's mostly due to unsold capacity and poor bin packing on many levels (user has an oversized kube cluster, the cloud provider has spare machines, etc.). Many cloud machines just sit idle for years on end because someone has forgotten about them. In many cases, those idle resources are not used for lower priority jobs either, since they are being paid for by a customer.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    The proper comparison isn't to how much utilization they could get if they were theoretically perfect. You need to compare to the realistic alternatives. If you are running your own servers, you are probably utilizing an even lower percentage most of the time.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Not sure I can entirely agree. If you use for example a cloud machine service for your application (e.g. GCE) but you refer to a hosted database (Cloud Bigtable) then you are exploiting a service that is packed into the rest of Google's junk with very high utilization. You could also skip the machine reservation and get better utilization by using GAE or similar.
    - repsilat 6y ago
      > packed into the rest of Google's junk with very high utilization. Maybe packed in with other public cloud things? I thought the partitioning between public and private resources was done at a pretty coarse level, but might misremember. IMO more relevant is that Google public cloud resources are carbon neutral, at least wrt electricity. (Through buying green power and emissions credits, to the degree you believe the prices and the models I guess.)
YmiYugy 6y ago
A quick internet research reveals that the social cost per emitted ton of CO2 is most certainly much higher than $10. Estimates are around $140-$180 with many being much higher.

QuadrupleA 6y ago

OP here, thanks for the link - interesting to see this stuff translated into real kilowatt terms. I haven't followed the discussions much around server carbon footprints but agreed, for a small app you're not gonna save the earth by shaving 2 watts a day down to 0.2 watts or whatever. There's definitely some scale at which optimization makes a meaningful dent, would be interesting to study that more.

faitswulff 6y ago

...unless you’re a blockchain startup.

godelski 6y ago

I'm not sure this adds up. If it is a trivial change, why not do it? 100Kg is 100Kg. That's like seeing a dollar bill sitting on the ground and not picking it up. No effort. But it is something everyone can do as well. As a parallel let's look at diets[0] (independent gives higher numbers[1]). Lots of people reduce their meat intake to reduce their personal carbon footprint. But the average diet is about 2000 kgCO2eq/yr (3000 via Independent). A vegetarian diet is about 1200kg and a vegan is around 250kg (potentially dubious claim but it is for sure less than a mean and less than a vegetarian diet). 10 websites changing to local fonts is like a single person changing to a vegetarian diet. The logic here is that you could $20-$30/yr and completely eliminate your dietary footprint, which is much easier than changing diets. So are what these people doing useless? No. It helps because the aggregate. It helps because it makes people conscious of the problem and how their choices affect the world. But yeah, big corporations should be doing more, but without them doing something that doesn't mean you should give up and do nothing. [0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much-would-giving-up-meat-help-the-environment https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/climate-change-carbon-emissions-family-household-flights-vegan-a9203096.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/climate-change-carbon-e...

NegativeLatency 6y ago
Considering the pandemic I think about $10 is the threshold I’d be willing to pick up. But I also probably wouldn’t pick it up on principle so the person who dropped it could come back and get it. I don’t know how to extend your analogy to account for my process though.

mehrdadn 6y ago

> Plugging the numbers in the Internet then emits 180 billion kilograms of CO2. So the author, by switching to local fonts, reduced the carbon emissions of the Internet by 0.000000056%. There ~7.8 billion people on the planet. If you vote (let's say everyone votes for the sake of the argument), you're increasing the percentage of people voting by ~0.0000000128%. This change is just as "meaningless" as that one, so... don't go vote?

kortilla 6y ago
There is no global election. But even if there was, the trade-off is do you do this stupid thing that gets a tiny vote or do you do something that’s 1000x more effective. At some point you need to stop focusing on stupid shit when planting a tree does far more.

other_herbert 6y ago

Our product isn't at that scale, but because of the way our hosting environment is set up we have typically 8 machines at 3% usage over a week... Some of this is pushing back against the desire by management or others in your group to seem larger than really necessary... I guess I'm saying part of pushing back against waste is taking care of both sides... I know if I tried to get our people to shut down half of our current infrastructure people (who have no real knowledge of any actual load numbers) would never allow that... So much political nonsense... It's been a long week :)

m0zg 6y ago

It is very easily measurable. In fact many rack UPS units (such as 2.2KW APC ones I use in my garage) even compute the carbon fooprint for you in their management web UI in pounds of CO2. The numbers can be surprisingly high, actually, even if you just have a few servers.

ineedasername 6y ago

Well, if it's easy to cut down a bit without incurring other costs that might have still other CO2 implications, then why not? If most people make the effort, then the aggregate will add up to more than a FAANG, so a social push for it isn't a waste. Sure, don't expect to change the world on it alone. But if every industry takes on an awareness of this sort of thing, and each niche within an industry discovers some way to shave a fraction of % off it's emissions, it will all add up significantly. Doing this kinds of thing is always going to be a game of inches, not miles. We can't say "It won't even get us a mile, why should we bother?" Be realistic about it by all means, but take the easy inches when they present themselve.

hinkley 6y ago

As the link argues, you have to look at the utility (value) of the website. When a phone call or checking the website stops me driving across town, that's 100 WH - half a gallon of gas + wear and tear. If a review stops me from buying the wrong product, what's the footprint of that?