This is the reason why people hate “green solutions”.

You blame the cloud but you want to tax bandwidth. As if I can’t upload a tiny bit of code that uses tons of compute. And again to “protect privacy” - as if exporting personal data takes a non-negligible amount of traffic compared to Netflix/BitTorrent.

The only way that taxing externalities makes sense, is taxing at the source. If cloud “takes too much energy” then tax energy! And make it revenue neutral otherwise you’re just incentivising the government to increase taxes and waste even more money/resources.

Yup, tax carbon use of energy on the way into the data centre, let microsoft, google, amazon etc work out how they want to charge it.

Data centers in say south island new zealand powered by hydro will have near-zero carbon cost and thus be cheaper

The biggest issue with a carbon tax and data centre usage is how to charge tax on the 'import' of services.

> Data centers in say south island new zealand powered by hydro will have near-zero carbon cost

This is an incorrect mental model that is unfortunately repeated by so many people.

All¹ of the NZ hydro power is currently used by consumers.

If we add some extra load, then the marginal increase in kWh is 100% generated by gas (or maybe even coal at Huntley).

The same problem occurs when you buy “green” energy: unless you are careful to ensure your purchase creates new green generation, then it is just greenwashing (fooling oneself). This is a significant problem with CO2 credits (not saying you shouldn’t try, but don’t be surprised that CO2 production remains the same even if you try to offset).

¹ There may be short periods when the lakes are full, and water is spilled instead of being used for electricity generation, but that certainly isn’t common.

You're not wrong.

Perhaps the most charitable interpretation given they specify the South Island is they're assuming that we would displace the energy use of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter. Given that's about 13% of our total energy use, is powered by hydro dams without the grid capacity to transport to population centres, and run by Rio Tinto who keep threatening to throw their toys and go home...

(Of course, the other option would be to build the bloody grid capacity to get energy to where we need it, but that's a different story I guess.)

Much more direct to put a carbon tax on the energy used to power the datacenters. Some datacenters are on hydro power, and some are on coal. Penalize the coal

Charging for bandwidth doesn't align incentives to solve the problem

I agree, it seems like an energy tax would be more directly addressing the environmental impact, and the cloud services would in turn be forced to raise their prices to a something more accurately reflecting the cost of cleanup.

That makes no sense to me. I would think you'd impose a carbon tax or something and let the consumer prices sort themselves out.

Well, energy prices rising would affect cloud providers and their costs, which would be passed on to their clients, which would be passed on to the end user eventually.

You tried to make a point, but your example failed.

I see what you're saying: The parent is being glib in your case, not realizing that a blanket increase on energy prices would hit the working class much harder than those with the privilege of staying home or making more money.

> Ok let's make energy more expensive. I think it's only fair that the pain is distributed equitably, so let's put a $0.1/Gb tax on bandwidth [1], the cloud being one of the largest growing emitters of CO2.

Even if I grant that, I suspect if you're working from home and not business traveling, it's still a net negative of CO2 being emitted. I would think that nearly everything that the "cloud" replaces cost more in CO2 than the "cloud" itself.

But I realize that your point is that it's easy to come up with arbitrary taxes that hurt the poor, and that's a reasonable criticism, but I don't think that that implies that we shouldn't do any kind of externallity tax on carbon. Instead, we could use tax incentives to give a rebate to disproportionately affected poor people for gas, or we could use the extra revenue from the taxes to give rebates for electric cars.

I'm not claiming this is a perfect system, and there will definitely be people who slip through the cracks, and that sucks, but the cost of not doing enough about climate change is substantially worse.

Thanks for making this so concise. It's always easy to look at something and say "well these people are _weak_, because I can do without it, so I'm ready to tax/punish this behavior". It's true that society right now has lots of profligate energy waste, but without a path to transition out of this wasteful energy regime, the rise in prices will affect the most vulnerable in society.

Sadly, historically, when society was undergoing large changes, such as industrialization and urbanization, marginalized peoples were never really considered. We can't have fear of change hold back our progress, but we do need to be careful to offer marginalized peoples ways to ease transition into lower-energy regimes.

Aside: I didn't even register the sarcasm in this post when I first wrote it :D

> the cloud being one of the largest growing emitters of CO2.

I’m sure it is, but this misses the point. If someone can work from home or have a conference call rather than travel for a meeting, the emissions savings are huge.

However liking a video and clicking an advert generated by a algorithm that tracked habits…

Why not tax Cloud providers instead? The compute part is what takes the most power. And maybe exclude those who use green energy sources.