Hot, bad cooking at the net's edges

Companies like Google work hard to reduce data center energy use (they should be made to work even harder via a carbon tax!!!) but what about energy use at the edges? Russell Coker:

Web standards are complex and it’s difficult to do everything the way that one might desire. Making a web browser that doesn’t take 100% CPU time when the user is away from their desk may be a difficult technical challenge. Designing a web site that doesn’t trigger such unwanted behavior in common web browsers might also be a challenge. But when one company produces both a web browser and some web sites that get a lot of traffic it’s rather disappointing that they don’t get this right.

Action:

The consequences of such wasted CPU use are reduced CPU time for other programs which might be doing something useful, extra electricity use, and more noise from CPU cooling fans (which is particularly annoying for me in this case). Any suggesstions for reducing the CPU use of web browsers, particularly when idle?

Greening Linux

Kitchen Linker noticed on LWN.net that Linux Foundation says:

Power Management: Throughout the Summit, Linux developers, including the Linux Desktop Architects, met to discuss the increasing need for efficient power management in Linux. As a result of these meetings, Linux Foundation is organizing a “Green Linux” initiative to improve power management functionality in Linux. Making Linux “green” is becoming ever more important in all aspects of Linux adoption: mobile, desktop and server. The Linux Foundation will work with its workgroups, identify key projects and coordinate resources among its members to improve this functionality in the Linux platform. Power management developers will meet next week in Ottawa to continue work in this area.

That smells good in the kitchen.

Mankiw's blunder

Greg Mankiw posts that Robert Samuelson has joined the Pigou club in calling for a $2/gallon gas tax. Wonderful.

And Mankiw says:

One purpose of Pigovian taxation, in my view, is to avoid heavy-handed regulations with all their unintended consequences.

Absolutely, a point Kitchen Linker has loved to harp on these last few months.

Approving links to Mankiw have been a feature of the Kitchen for awhile now, even coming to dominate what Kitchen Linker intended to be just another blog about cool tech stuff. But that's good. What could be more important than saving the environment in the most efficient way possible?

Anyhoo, Mankiw makes a blunder in this last post:

I have proposed a more modest $1 increase, in part based on the research of Parry and Small, but of course there is a degree of uncertainty about how high the optimal tax is.

No, no, no! "Optimality" in the sense of correcting for externalities is the wrong, wrong, wrong metric to judge a Pigouvian tax by.

What is the right metric? Is the tax an better than growth-destroying taxes on labor and capital? That's all. Debating optimality may be a pins-on-the-head-of-an-angel-counting excercise for academic papers but is totally irrelevant to the public debate and to reality, which consists of trillions of dollars of taxes on production that could be shifted to taxes on destruction.

Taxing Avatars

Tim Bray writes about calculations that say an avatar in an online world consumes as much electricity as an average Brazilian. Kitchen Linker thinks this is a little exaggerated, as a human uses many other forms of energy. But those who run server farms could use some additional incentive to become more efficient. Yes, that's right, time to trot out the Pigouvian energy tax yet again. That might not be bad for Sun, Tim's employer, which apparently sells efficient servers and has an enviroguru.

Besides, aren't politicos looking for a way to tax virtual worlds anyway? An energy tax is a way to do it non-intrusively.

But long term virtual worlds are all good for the environment. They can allow us to cut back on car and plane trips. As Kitchen Linked before, IT is an efficiency-enabler.

Pigou means less planning

NoPigouClub:

But here's Jaccard's big claim: He supports Pigovian taxes because they involve "no role for planners." We'll have more on this untruth in later postings, but let's begin with one question: Who sets the price--i.e. the tax?

and

And then another question: What do we do with the money collected through the Pigovian tax? Let's get the Ministry of the Environment and the Department of Industry...but, hey, no planners, please.

Unless all NoPigouClub members are anarchists, they will admit that taxes need to be collected. The level of energy tax should not be set by the EPA or Commerce Department, but by Congress ... just as Income and other taxes are now set, mostly according to what Congress thinks it can get away with and how much is needed to cover spending minus borrowing. There is no additional planning, just a shift from one sort of taxes to another.

And the shift is better if you care about the environment, the economy, or simply distrust planners.

Why?

1. Taxes on income and capital suppress positive externalities (ex: economic growth).
2. Pigouvian taxes substitute for regulation and prohibition of greenhouse gas and other pollutant emissions.
3. (Redundant, but Kitchen Linker must drive home the point) Without pigouvian taxes, we will continue to have damaging tax on labor and capital AND extremely inefficient and politically determined non-solutions to our environmental problems (ex: the SugarCorn mafia)

Come to grips with reality NoPigou and switch clubs!

Java and Javascript, free and efficient

Wow, Javascript and now Java, free.

Both are good for the environment, too. Adobe's JS VM is way faster (i.e., more efficient) than the ones that ship with web browsers. And Sun's Java is way fast too. To the extent scripting languages (Python, Ruby, ...) run on the Java VM instead of their own, lots of cycles (i.e., energy/emissions) are saved.

Kitchen Linker lives in interesting and cool times!

Green programming: D language

On the subject of efficient programming (machine time/energy/electricity AND programmer), Kitchen Linker wonders why the D programming language hasn't replaced C/C++ AND Java/C#. D is as fast as the former and as easy as the latter and entirely practical.

Green programmers, check out D for your next project.

"Green" software development and n-order effects

Thought provoking post:

Face it: every layer added between your code and the hardware costs something once you scale it up, just like it does for a million gasoline cars. In the case of web pages and applications, that something is electricity. Most of which is generated by fossil fuels. Most of which comes from coal mines or oil imports.

As a first-order effect, yes. But IT is an efficiency-enabler. As an n-order effect, Kitchen Linker is not sure that making programmers more efficient by allowing them to write inefficient code is a bad thing for the environment.

But, do turn off your damned screensaver!