I mean, as a general expectation, that’s ridiculous. Businesses will always optimise for profitability, expecting them to eat their margin voluntarily for environmental concerns is unlikely to be a solution.

As a policy, though, it makes sense - tax the environmental externalities appropriately to reflect the actual shared cost. If it’s still economic to add the servers once those costs are factored in, then you wouldn’t have any grounds to complain.

Problem is, taxing electricity appropriately shuts down your whole economy. Prices would need to be sky-high before SV would feel the squeeze, till then mom and pop wont be able to run their electric hob and your neighbourhood steel smelter will move to china even faster. Taxes may seem like an easy solution, but if you look closely it is far more complex.

There's nothing saying you have to tax the first watt like the millionth watt.

Just design the tax regime so that it is high usage users who are paying the high costs, and exclude any usage levels that would impact homes, small businesses, and "normal" acceptable uses.

I agree that tax policy is more complex than just "tax the shit out of it", but everytime a tax is proposed, there comes a group of people who argue that taxation is so complex that we can't possibly grok it. That is clearly not the case.

Everytime a tax is proposed, people like me suggest to look at the German Energiewende. Small businesses and private homes are taxed to hell and back on electricity, to keep prices for large businesses internationally competitive, because those bussineses can just pack up and go elsewhere. Or cause a revolution when going bancrupt. Taxing large consumers more also doesn't work. Taxes are never the single answer, you always need to combine them with import duties, ending trade agreements, leaving the WTO, maybe even leaving the EU to be able to levy duties on other European countries with a lesser energy tax. Because that is what it takes to create a fair tax regime on energy.

I guess only the very radical greens would want to stomach that backlash...

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, that sounds pretty reasonable to me. The idea that we'll have to make (at least) this level of compromise to survive as a species seems to still not be taken seriously in the tech world.

I can sympathize with downvoters, demanding change is always easier when the demand is aimed at others, not yourself or your peergroup. And I'm not sure if this level of compromise is really necessary, or if optimizing computer power consumption is just negligible on a global scale and the resources spent to optimize here (it will cost money after all, even if the initial investment pays later on) would be better spent elsewhere.

My comment was aimed more at the hypocrisy of claiming to be green and then skipping the obvious savings in optimizations.

No, it definitely doesn't have that direct impact on environmemt. If you're using cloud servers, what it costs to you is not always connected to how many physical servers are running. On top of that, AWS, for example, claims to use renewable sources for over 50% servers.

Moreover, there are other considerations. If you're spending too much time on optimization, the company may not survive... leading all the work done to potentially go to waste. What about the environmental impact of waste there?