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.