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?

Xmas lights

Christmas lights. Bah-hum-bug!

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.

"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!

Billion Biofuel Branson

Bully for Branson. The article reads like most of the expected $3 billion (highly unknown, based on future Virgin profits) will be spent on developing biofuels. That sounds unexciting, but looks like they're going for big improvements.

The first investment was made in Cilion, a new California company building ethanol refineries that Virgin officials said burn far less fossil fuel than conventional biofuel operations.

However I think people are confusing not using fossil fuels and not producing greenhouse gasses:

“But the only way global warming is going to be beaten is to invest in new fuels that can actually replace fossil fuels.”

Uh, biofuels still produce greenhouse gasses. That's why I'm more excited by solar, windpower and other zero-emission technologies.

But airplanes aren't going to fly on electricity anytime soon, so Branson can be forgiven for being conservative. IATA has some cool figures on airplane fuel efficiency:

• New aircraft are 70% more fuel efficient than 40 years ago and 20% better than 10 years ago.
• The industry is aiming for a further 50% fuel efficiency improvement by 2020.
• Modern aircraft achieve fuel efficiencies of 3.5 litres per 100 passenger km.
• The A380 and B787 are aiming for 3 litres per 100 passenger km – better than a compact car!

I had no idea airplanes had improved so much. Sounds like another good investment would be to retire old planes ASAP. Maybe big airlines will lobby to force retirement, as new airlines using old planes are cutting into big airlines' profits.

Giant offshore windpower

Gizmag and Science Blog write about a really cool idea: giant floating wind turbines located offshore. Advantages:

• Bigger is much better for wind power, and these can be huge.
• More wind is much better for wind power, and there's lots more wind on open sea than on land.
• They are not fixed, so can be towed to where power is needed.
• They would be far enough offshore that nobody can see them from shore.
• All of the usual wind power benefits (relatively cheap, no pollution, no greenhouse gas, no peak oilfossil fuel, not controlled by klepetro-states...)

This idea needs to be implemented ... full force!