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I'm becoming increasingly extreme on actions were should take to fight climate change, but have to agree with you here. This type of weirdness happens because o

I'm becoming increasingly extreme on actions were should take to fight climate change, but have to agree with you here. This type of weirdness happens because of super specific regulation instead of creating the right incentive structure. Just charge for negative externalities, in this case carbon emissions. That will incentivice consumers to seek out low-power consumption devices and energy providers to offer competitive pricing by avoiding carbon emissions. Set the right incentives and then the market/everyone together will solve the problem

jiggawatts 5y ago
Externalities is precisely correct, but even that can fall into traps. For example, pure hosting providers care deeply about the electricity usage, because they have to pay for the air conditioning needed to cool the waste heat. From their perspective, that $50 extra in power is actually more like $100 in electricity + cooling costs for a server that might only bring in $500 in revenue to them in the same time frame. Meanwhile that server could be running a database that costs $300,000 per year in licensing alone, hosting software that cost $100M to develop, and supports 10K staff managing $2B in turnover. So of course, it's going to be slowed down to 50% by the guy in charge of the air conditioning to save him $50...