Reducing CO₂ emissions with faster software
What can you as a software developer do to fight climate change?
My first and primary answer is getting involved with local politics.
However, if you write software that operates at sufficient scale, you can also reduce carbon emissions by making your software faster.
In this article we’ll cover:
- Why more computation uses more electricity.
- Why you probably don’t need to think about this most of the time.
- Reducing emissions by reducing compute time.
- Reducing emissions with parallelism (even with the same amount of compute time!).
- Some alternative scenarios and caveats: embodied emissions and Jevons Paradox.
More computation, more emissions
We can start with an extremely simplified model tying computation to carbon emissions:
- Electricity in most places around the world is generated at least in part