The level of misinformation, misplaced priorities and uninformed conclusions in climate change has reached staggering levels.

We have people who don't believe it's real (which is silly) and, at the other end of the scale, people who believe we can actually fix it in 50 years (which is just as silly, even 100 years is silly). People are convinced they "know" the "truth" without even bothering to throw a few numbers at a spreadsheet to see if what they think they know aligns with any imaginable version of a non-science-fiction reality.

I am very concerned that politics and ignorance is driving this far more than real science.

What are you trying to get at with these numbers? By themselves, they mean absolutely nothing! It all depends on the impact you're having. If you're optimizing code running on a server that's mostly idle, then you'll not see a big reduction in energy use. If the result of your optimization is that you can shut down 10 servers because of overall load reductions, the time invested suddenly has a very real benefit.

They mean plenty, they just require you apply some critical thinking...

5$ to 50$ is not 10 servers on Heroku. In fact, it's not even one server, you'll be sharing resources at that price point.

Let's say you generate approx. 500 lbs of CO2 a year (based of figures for a half desktop PC running 24/7 because you're only getting 2 cores and 1GB of ram)

At this point you're thinking, 500lbs?! That's insane!

But 40 hrs (1 week) is a lot of time, and 500lbs of CO2 is less than it seems.

If you spent 40hrs spread out over an entire year air drying your clothes a total of 20 times, you'd save over 2 Tons of CO2 a year. (You can do the math for a dishwasher if air drying doesn't work where you are)

If you live in a cold climate, the EPA estimates you can save 15%, or almost 1000 lbs of CO2, by weather proofing your home, easily accomplished in 40hrs

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You might say "I already do all these things!", but the point is there are so many ways to convert time to CO2 savings.

We spend a lot of CO2 trying to save time you could say.

Optimizing your bootstrapped service is not one of the places I would use CO2 expenditure as reasoning in the slightest.

Uhm... isn't that exactly what I wrote? Besides, the CO2 that we humans exhale doesn't count towards global warming because the carbon in it is part of the natural carbon cycle. That's roughly the same amount that gets reabsorbed into plants that are grown for next year's food. What really matters is the carbon that is added to that cycle from sources outside this biological cycle. In other words, the 1kWh of electical power is strictly worse than the 1kWh of human power as long as some fraction of it comes from non-renewable sources. At best, if it were sourced purely regeneratively, it would be exactly even.

If you think my comment is saying what yours said, kindly read both again.

This comment reads you didn't read my reply, humans could make 0 CO2 and spending a week optimizing 10 servers and not make a dent compared to simple lifestyle changes.

I used 1 server because that's the scale thread was about ( saving <50$ of spend on Heroku)

I know you tried to make it about 10 servers to force a point, doesn't end up changing much though...

* Compute period is 10% of all electricity production*

You found stats on that? I’m surprised

Actually the figure I found was for "all ICT", if we mean compute to be data centers (I did) , it's even lower:

2% projected to reach 8% in a decade (https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-ce...)