Itamar Turner-Trauring:
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.
Itamar tackles a tricky topic in this post, performing tests to compare implementations of different efficiency. At the same time that’s kept in perspective with other carbon emitting activities:
This suggests that if you’re writing software that isn’t widely used, making it faster isn’t particularly impactful activity from a climate perspective, even if it’s a generally useful improvement. So if you want to take individual action outside of political engagement, you’re better off switching from beef to chicken (or better yet, beans), or swapping your car trip for an e-bike ride.
In a related post, Gathering Data On TLS Power Draw Measurements, Nicolas ‘CounterPillow’ F. argues using a small experiment that the use of TLS does not constitute a significant contributor to climate change. That’s not to say it’s not worth making your software more efficient—especially if it has any kind of scale—but to keep it in perspective with other actions you can take.