"The climate crisis threatens human civilization on a grand scale and electricity is frequently produced from fossil fuel. Electricity is then consumed by the operation of computer code. Google alone used 12.8 Terrawatt-hours in 2019 according to its 2020 environmental report, more than many countries and more than several US states. It seems intuitive that improving code efficiency should reduce environmental impact. Does it?
The answer is not at all clear and must be considered on a system by system basis. The main reason is induced demand.
...it will take a centrally coordinated process at both national and international levels that can allocate energy to different industrial and consumer sectors and manage the energy production mix on behalf of the whole of society. Only then we can solve this problem in a rational way that doesn’t depend on luck.
In fairness, software companies aren’t power companies, it’s a little ridiculous to expect them to build their own generation. What we can more expect from them is to pay taxes, divest from fossil fuel companies if they hold securities, and hold their total energy consumption under a ceiling set by a regulator while the society changes the energy mix as fast as possible."
This is a pretty excellent site. A few years ago, I worked on a series on nuclear weapons and recently released one of the articles. There's a backlog of articles you can read by clicking on the publication including on the physics.
https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-spring-factory-4c3d988e712...
And a bounce function:
https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-bounce-factory-3498de1e526...