The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud
* The Jevons paradox seems really relevant but there&#x27;s no analysis done. The predecessors to the cloud seem important to look at if you&#x27;re being honest about analysis of efficiency, but...<p>* &quot;While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive.&quot; Okay, so we&#x27;re using a definition of &quot;the &#x27;Cloud&#x27;&quot; that extends to the services that run on it. Tricky to evaluate cost-benefit if you&#x27;re doing that, but okay, sure. &quot;Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.&quot; Sorry, <i>what</i>? So you don&#x27;t actually mean cloud computing when you say &quot;the Cloud&quot;, you mean <i>everything connected to the Internet</i>?<p>* All of the stuff about the wastefulness of protection against failure seems pretty sketchy to me, especially when considering that the preceding systems had all of the redundancy of every business that needed compute having its own physical servers scaled for peak. But again, there&#x27;s no consideration of &quot;what did we use to have&quot; or &quot;what would we need if we didn&#x27;t have this&quot;...<p>* Putting in a quote like &quot;It festers in his mind, clawing at his thoughts, probing his sanity, poisoning him with a constant spell of dread and anxiety.&quot; to color the locals&#x27; objection to noise is <i>pretty dramatic</i>, so there must be good evidence for how awful it is, right? &quot;Over the course of my fieldwork with the communities of Chandler and Printer’s Row, I learned that the “noise” of the Cloud uniquely eludes regulatory schemes. In many cases, the loudness of the data centers, as measured in decibels (dB), falls below the threshold of intolerance as prescribed by local ordinances. For this reason, when residents contacted the authorities to intervene, to attenuate or quiet their noise, no action was taken, because the data centers had not technically violated the law, and their properties were zoned for industrial purposes. However, upon closer interrogation of the sound, some residents reported that the monotonal drone, a frequency hovering within the range of human speech, is particularly disturbing, given the attuned sensitivity of human ears to discern such frequencies above others. Even so, there were days when the data centers, running diesel generators, vastly exceeded permissible decibel-thresholds for noise.&quot; .... So I&#x27;m supposed to read &quot;uniquely eludes regulatory schemes&quot; as... &quot;isn&#x27;t as loud as the limits for the relevant zoning.&quot; Cool. How elusive of them. What are the limits supposed to be? How often are they being exceeded? Why should I give credence to &quot;some residents&quot; on the importance of the frequency -- shouldn&#x27;t there be studies about that? I live in an area with noise pollution so I am fully willing to take this issue seriously, and I can believe that the existing regulation isn&#x27;t catching what it should, but this doesn&#x27;t read like someone being serious about presenting the issue!<p>* &quot;Historian Nathan Ensmenger writes that a single desktop computer requires 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals, and 1,500 kilograms of water to manufacture. The servers that fill the halls of data centers are dense, specialized assets, with some units valued in the tens of thousands of U.S. dollars.&quot; So the implication slithering between these sentences are that servers are worse than desktops vis-a-vis environmental impact of physical production, and desktops are really bad... but that&#x27;s not actually <i>shown</i> by the fact that servers are expensive.<p>* &quot;Even with these sustainability initiatives in place, environmental organizations like Greenpeace estimate that less than 16 percent of the tons of e-waste generated annually is recycled.&quot; Yes! This is a huge problem! Only... what percent of that is consumer-level and what percent industrial? Is cloud computing less efficient re: e-waste? The author seems to be saying that we should leave things in use until they break, but, well, in practice that&#x27;s kind of all those standards codify anyway.<p>Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. I really care about the environmental impact of data centers and computing, and I want more people to care, but I want them to have better material to work with than this suggestive hand-wavey piece that <i>isn&#x27;t even compelling from an anthropological perspective.</i>