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Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits
BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?"
I do find it ironic that computing started out with large mainframes, and now it seems more and more likely that the majority of computing needs in the future will be met by terminals connected to mainframes via virtualization.
The whole concept of "carbon neutral" and off-setting your carbon emissions for whatever reason seams kind of lame to me. Instead of continuing to do things that cause global warming while doing other things to supposedly reduce your "carbon footprint", why not just try to eliminate or reduce the problems in the first place? It's not just individuals, it's the whole mindset of society. Instead of going for carbon-neutral server farms, why not develop cleaner alternative electricity options to power those server farms? Solar power could do a lot, but we'd rather earn carbon certificates. It just doesn't make sense.
Not only has the "global warming" not being proven yet, but the CO2 role in it would be completely bogus a claim. Carbon credits are just another financial scheme to strip suckers from their money. It will eventually prove to be yet another bubble, with the usual disastrous consequences when it folds.
Global warming is easily provable but the jury's still out on the contribution of humanities CO2 emissions. As a result of insulting ideas such as carbon credits and green taxes, I'm deliberately doubling my carbon footprint over the next decade (obviously in such a way that I avoid "green" taxation).
I'm as liberal as they come but this carbon credit nonsense has to stop.
You either do something to be more efficient and earth-friendly or you don't.
Carbon credits allows the rich to keep doing whatever they want while preaching to others to live more conservatively.
Here's a thought, focus on the worst pollution areas of the world like China and reduce air travel by half - why do people fly so much if it's such a hassle to fly, especially to/from/within the USA?
this whole carbon trading thing reeks of profiteering to me.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Companies provide incentives for you to buy their products. What's new?
Wow, sounds like a good idea to start looking at IBM's stock.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
we came in?
Apologies to Pink Floyd.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Assuming that you mean the electronic computers, we are talking about The ENIAC. It handled 1 problem at a time, was a pain to work with, and was inefficient. That is more akin to the PC, than a mainframe. Mainframes handle loads of ppl/problems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Carbon credits sounds like a polite solution that governments come up with at the begining of a long term problem. Like voluntary rationing. Not that energy efficient isn't a good thing.
Where the long term problem is either global warming, sickening pollution, rising cost of depleted resources, war for whatever reason, etc.
I'm sorry, but could someone explain what a carbon credit is, or what these "emerging carbon markets" are all about?
I did some cursory research, and as best as I can tell, carbon certificates have value only in public perception. Like gold stars for exceptional pupils.
Is there really a market for "warm & fuzzy feelings" now?
...and reducing the amount of pollution we spew into the atmosphere is beneficial to us and to the environment, global-warming boogeyman or not.
Peak oil is going to do the job instead.
Deleted
At the moment there is no permission required to pollute, you could pump as much CO2 into the air as you like. Well, instead of that the government says:
1: You need permission to pollute.
2: You get those permissions from the carbon credit markets.
3: You have to buy them at whatever they cost in that market every year.
4: You can sell permissions if you have more than you need.
Then the government auctions enough credits to represent a slight reduction in the overall production in CO2. Each credit might represent one tonne of CO2. Then each year the government reduces the numbers of credits available in the market. The cost of a credit then increases simply due to the reduction in supply or the increase in demand.
As the cost of emitting the CO2 increases, companies will switch to alternative solutions, choosing whichever they like best.
Of course, this only works if politicians aren't completely corrupt or utter morons, as seems largely to be the case. In that case they might give companies credits and allow them to sell them on the markets, it's basically free money to those companies which receive the credits.
Deleted
...doesn't make any sense to me. How do you sell your cleanliness to someone else? Either you are or you aren't. Who determined the zero point where you earn credit vs. damage? Who came up with this crazy idea first and are they rubbing their hands maniacally?
It isn't going to the people who need it. It's a real false idea that the major problem in these extremely poor countries is lack of money. Some seem to hold the idea that what is going on is nobody is willing to give them any money, and if we'd just quite being assholes then they'd have plenty.
Well, not so much. There actually is aid, more than you'd think. The problem is that aid can't be taken to the people who need it. The big problems really are war, corruption, and population growth. When a nation is torn by war, it's real hard to help those who need it. War makes it physically hard to move the goods where they need to be, and of course war is the act of destroying things, so you need just that much more. Then we have corruption. Especially in the case of money there is the tendency for it to just disappear in to the pockets of those in power and never reach the intended goal.
These are the real problems here, not the lack of aid. Watch Blackhawk Down sometime. That opening sequence with people being gunned over food aid? That shit really happens.
As such carbon credits would solve nothing in that department, even if it is the poor countries selling them. More money is not what is needed, especially if you are saying "Just send the money over there in cash form." That will lead to all of none of it reaching those in need. I can't tell you what the answer is, if I knew I'd be working towards it, but throwing money at the problem isn't it. It's a pity it wasn't that simple, but it just isn't.
If I've ever heard of something ripe for the plucking by anyone and everyone who is just a tad corrupt, then this is it. We'll have a proper eco-mob. Seriously, who's going to regulate this market ? Who checks the validity of these certificates ? Because this sounds like printing your own money.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Excellent point. I can think of a lot of reasons to reduce CO2 and other emissions that are far better and more immediate that climate change.
/. is *not* a good reflection on what a lot of people think)
Unfortunately its lost on a lot of people. Regardless what you believe the whole GW debate has got so... politically religious that a lot of people just don't want to know anymore. (note:
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
So .. how much carbon certificates do i get when i change my plan and instead of building farm of ENIACs (174kW each) i use Sinclair ZX spectrum (12W max?)
I am getting sick to the gut from this carbon credit crap that is spouted all over the place. Doesn't anyone think any more these days? See: www.carbonhoax.org.nz
"green taxes" are just another excuse for increasing taxes.. If it wasn't "global warming" as an excuse, it would be something else.
If the government truly want to reduce carbon emissions, they need to stop punishing those who emit carbon because there's often no other practical choice. Instead, they need to provide incentives to use and develop alternatives, and incentives to reduce energy use.
As an example, look at fuel taxes... Intended to force people onto overcrowded overpriced public transport. The public transport systems in most large cities are horrendous, animal rights groups would be up in arms if someone tried to transport cattle in such conditions. You get a large concentration of businesses in a small space, and no affordable housing nearby which results in huge numbers of people having to travel. And if you live outside of a big city, then public transport tends to have very poor coverage.
You need to encourage businesses to spread out, and build their offices where there is an abundance of affordable housing for their staff, or in many cases staff could easily work from home (and the government could encourage this with tax breaks for companies with employees at home, and pressure on telco's to provide better home working enabling services).
It is utterly ridiculous for so many companies to be concentrated in small areas at the centre of large cities, and then require their staff to waste hours of their days enduring inhumane conditions to get there.
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In the end we'll end up with just 5 huge mainframes in the world as foretold by the IBM executive in the 50's? (can't remember where he was quoted).
Granting carbon credits for cutting your electricity bill seems like double-counting to me. The whole point is meant to be that the carbon quotas apply at the point where carbon dioxide is emitted. For example, a coal-fired power station could close down and be replaced by a tidal power station, generating carbon credits which can be sold on. If in turn a user of electricity gets credited for using less (even though the power they are buying didn't generate carbon to start with), that is clearly bogus.
So if only the producer of CO2 emissions must pay for carbon emissions (or get subsidized for reducing them, which amounts to the same thing in marginal cost terms), how is there any incentive for people to cut electricity use? Because the cost of buying CO2 quota is passed down as part of their electricity bill. The economic incentive for moving to a more efficient computer is a lower power bill, just as it's always been.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
So you want to have companies build where there is an abundance of affordable housing for their staff?
Uhm.
Do you know what as city is?
IBM promoting a proprietary technology? Wouldn't you get the same type of saving on moving to Power or Sparc instead of x86 since they are also hugely more energy efficent? You also have to remember that it depends on what your processing, mainframe will only provide you with a speed boost with certain types of basic arithmetic (quite a big speed boost in some cases). So take these increases with a pinch of salt. On second thoughts perhaps I'm just bitter from increasing capacity the capacity of our mainframes to run more processes, and finding all our existing licenses cost more because they all charge you on potential capacity of the system rather than number of copies even if you not using the extra capacity for the existing apps.
Really
:-)
Thank god I've always been an engineer
As a general rule, if you're building a business computer and want to save as much as electricity as possible, the most highly virtualized (and virtualizable) platform wins. So attributes like massive caches and screaming I/O help enormously. (I think there was a Stanford study recently that figured this out.) Thus it's no surprise a modern mainframe is more energy efficient than anything else.
But in the Computerworld article referenced in the original story, IBM says the carbon program will also be available for its System p servers at some point in the future. My prediction is that you'll typically get fewer certificates if you move to System p versus System z, but it's likely businesses will do some of both depending on what sort of applications they're rehosting. There are some types of applications that will do better on System p, and there is some software that runs on AIX that doesn't run on z/OS or Linux.
Regarding SPARC it's impossible to say since Sun hasn't entered into any carbon credit auditing system yet. The IBM-Neuwing program is a first. However, my prediction is that you'll get even fewer certificates if you consolidate to SPARC. I say that simply because I assume IBM is acting in its own self-interest, and I'm sure they think the energy efficiency fight is one they can win against other vendors. In this case self-interest and environmentalism coincide. For any of these platforms, though, businesses will figure out whether the certificates favor certain platforms over others, and they'll do that application by application (or application function by application function). And many other factors will go into the decision as well, although most of those factors pull in the same direction as energy efficiency, such as software charges. One could even imagine that before long server vendors lagging in the energy efficiency department will start bundling carbon certificates with their servers in order to compete. Thus IBM adopting this program is a smart way to respond to an untapped market need and to raise the effective price of competing servers compared to IBM's. Very smart move.
By the way, the world has totally flipped on its head, and it would be extremely misleading to say an IBM mainframe is "proprietary" and X86 (for example) isn't. What does proprietary mean? You can run pure 100% GPL Linux on an IBM mainframe -- Debian, Slackware, CentOS, etc. -- and you don't even need a closed source driver as you usually need for X86 servers. IBM publishes extreme instruction-level detail in a free book called Principles of Operation, and it's so detailed and thorough that the open source community created an implementation of the instruction set called Hercules that actually works compared to still imperfect efforts like Bochs and QEMU. (Although IBM may assert patent claims on its processor architecture.) One company is porting OpenSolaris to System z, and they didn't even have to ring up IBM. In comparison, Intel and AMD also may assert patent claims, and AMD is suing Intel for alleged monopolistic behavior. Neither Intel nor AMD publish PoO-type documents (to that level of detail). Then there's Microsoft Windows, and it's hard to think of any more proprietary OS than that.
Also, IBM changed the way it charges for z/OS software about 7 years ago. Now almost everything is charged by the amount you actually use, something IBM calls Variable Workload License Charge (VWLC). If you run a little bit of DB2 in one LPAR (partition) but a lot of IMS in another, then you pay a little for DB2 and more for IMS. You also control exactly what you consume using something called softcaps, and you can set those either per-LPAR or for a group of LPARs. One interesting little twist to mainframe subcapacity licensing is that, if you need a little bit of WebSphere (and a lot of other IBM products), the lowest entry price (smallest license you can order) is for z/OS. You can order as little as 1 "Value Uni
Come back when we reach peak-coal.
Rethinking email
In an age of terrorism, being distributed is better than being centralized.
Before you get too excited about this, first price a mainframe. You first have to rewire your building for three-phase power, since they don't run on wall current. Then you've consolidated all your servers to one box, so you'd better have 24x7 uninterruptible power, and your current UPS generator likely doesn't supply 3-phase power. You also have to have adequate cooling, even with air-cooled z9 models. Then you have to buy a z9 (their entry level) and software, which is pretty expensive. Then you have to buy disk space. You will probably buy a x86 solution like the FlexES CUB, unless you can afford mainframe channel-attached DASD. Then you'll have to hire someone to care for this new beast, and good luck because no one learns about mainframes in college anymore. (Or, start on page 1 of the ABCs of Systems Programming five-volume set IBM publishes.... You won't be productive any time soon.) After that, you can start porting your programs to the zSeries instruction set, since you can't run x86 binaries. The only good news is you can run your Java programs as-is in the OMVS POSIX shell. Then you can start licensing the software every year.
...please pay for your indulgences in this box. That's the benefit of being a Catholic, because we have got sin available to be indulged at a price that's right for you!
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
In an age of terrorism, being distributed is better than being centralized.
Problem is most people can't think distributed. Including management and programmers.
Now imagine all that idle, untapped compute power on all the desktops in any organization. All goes to waste. Add it up, a wasted super computer.
Besides, it will never be successfully and fully centralized again, the overhead of .NET, Java and today's programming methods would require too much CPU/memory/I-O. In our organization it has been tried using various technologies, Citrix, Solaris zones, VMWare and the same story happens every time. It gets over allocated until it doesn't work correctly. Then you have to explain to deaf management why you don't want to put a real time data input app on the same host as a OLTP or data warehouse.
Or, (looking at the, umm, bright side) it could provide years of additional productive employment for all those about-to-retire early Boomers who didn't plan too well for their retirements.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/
Take an array of 1U cheapo intel servers with consistent Lights Out Management systems, a really nice 10Gbit ethernet switch, or maybe InfiniBand, install a basic Linux. Install Xen, Install a load balancing system like Sun Grid Engine.
Write some clever scripts and whahey! Your own personal mainframe/virtual datacentre with power and AC requirements which depend on your workload, which BTW, you can keep at 90% plus, rather than the more common 18%. The secret is in the "clever scripts", the fastest network (It's always been about the network) you can get your hands on and a bit of imagination.
This is BTW, what Cisco and VMWARE are working on. Basically a commodity mainframe; commodity hardware, commodity software. IBM of course have been doing it for decades... Smart cookies IBM, they really understand computing.
Deleted
Why do I feel like I'm reading an advertisement?
Are mainframes really 6 times more power efficient per MFLOP (or whatever unit) than blade servers? I thought the CPU was the main power hog in a server these days and I'm skeptical that there's so much difference between, say, an Opteron and a Power6. Is that true or is this a hype number?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
carbon dating? Sorry, couldn't resist.
First of all, there are five operating systems available for System z, including Linux and z/OS. You do not need z/OS to run Linux, although you do need Linux to run z/OS. (The Hardware Management Console is Linux-based.)
But since you mentioned JCL (Job Control Language), a unique z/OS feature, it's interesting that UNIX doesn't seem to have any analog to it. (Shell scripts aren't really the same thing at all. They're more analogous to TSO and REXX.) It's certainly a simple syntax and arguably quite a bit easier to learn than shell scripts. That said, nowadays people write a lot less JCL since the serious usability improvements, e.g. modern development tools, tend to do it all for you, e.g. compiling your code.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
So is Neuwing Energy Ventures a paper mill? Cutting down the trees you get your certificates from?
Cooling may be an localized issue, but likely it will actually decrease overall requirements rather than the reverse.
(I work in a critical data center as a facility supervisor FWIW. I've seen the pendulum swing from centralized computing to decentralized virtual servers, and now it's starting to swing back again, though not in my workplace. Yet.)
I don't know enough about the other costs to comment intelligently, though obviously everything does have a cost-in mainframe or de-centralized server environments.
The abundant housing is usually around the edges of a city, whereas businesses usually set themselves up in the centre where all the other businesses are...
So you end up with large numbers of people having to travel from the edges to the centre every day, over crowding the transport systems. There is usually not an abundance of affordable housing within walking distance of where all the businesses are running.
What we need is a larger number of smaller towns, where people can live and work within walking or biking distance. Or, just change the layout of larger cities, knock down 2/3 of the office buildings in the center and build apartments for people working at the remaining 1/3 to live in.
I want to live within walking distance of where i work, not so much for the environment but for my own benefit. I value my time, and wasting several hours of it a day travelling is a complete waste.
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There are degrees of better. A Toyota Camry gets better gas mileage than a Lincoln Navigator, and a Toyota Prius gets better gas mileage than a Camry. System p does well, and System z does really well, basically.
Watts per core is interesting but is not even close to the whole game. Mobile Intel processors consume relatively few watts, for example, but typically they aren't well suited to highly concentrated and virtualized business computing. They're great for notebook computers, though. It's really about how many users you can serve across 100+ diverse business applications using a given processor consuming a certain number of watts (and how reliably, securely, predictably, etc.)
Carbon Credits has to be the one of the most genius Capitalistic money making ideas ever! Let's take this idea and start FAT Credits.....That way, FAT people can buy credits and feel better about themselves while still consuming the same amount of poisonous high caloric content. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter the result, it's about feeling better emotionally. Gore should of won the Nobel prize for economics, not weather or whatever that was.
-------- Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. --Ozzy
since they are just a means to transfer wealth from person, organization, corporation, nation, etc to another while not actually accomplishing the task of diminishing co2 output only shifting it from those who don't produce to those who do, and why is it that co2 gets a bad rap in the first place since water vapor is a much more powerfull greenhouse gases http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/environment/appd_d.html
The short answer is yes. In typical real world data centers most X86 processors burn a lot of watts (and generate heat, which must be cooled), take up a lot of space, do only one thing (e.g. serving files, running a firewall, churning through some PHP to compose a page, or something else), and are busy an average of 5% over their powered up lifetimes, give or take. They are also often I/O starved (cache misses, waiting on data from disk) and do more "housekeeping" work (encryption, I/O, etc.) You need to cluster them for higher availability, doubling energy consumption, plus add disaster recovery servers. Virtualization, such as VMware, provides some benefit, but it's still very difficult in the real world to make large efficiency improvements.
Mainframe processors (which are z/Architecture CPUs, not POWER6 by the way) spend their entire powered on lives consuming less electricity (and generating less heat), take up less space, do hundreds of things (virtualization), and are busy an average of 80% or more over their powered up lifetimes. (It's not uncommon for them to run flat out at 100% round the clock.) They are rarely I/O starved (cache misses are rare), and they do almost no housekeeping work because low power specialized support processors take care of that. You can use virtual clusters on a single server, because everything inside the server is redundant but in a low power way. (If a CPU fails, for example, the system swaps in a spare dynamically without even the OS having a clue it happened.) DR is also more power efficient.
But regardless of the reasons, what's most interesting about this development is that server energy consumption is now going to be subject to exact, real world measurement. The measurements are in pure business terms: if you reduce power consumption in your data center while presumably still running your business, you get credits (worth money) you can sell. I think that's the fairest way to separate vendor hype from reality, and to encourage businesses to actually reduce their power consumption in the most effective ways possible. How much total, real business computing activity can a particular processor support per watt per year? These certificates will answer that.
NUTS!
I forgot to say that that 16-way system is just a midrange "p" box from IBM.
The product line works like this:
x - x86 Architecture Processors.
p - Maximum Performance. UNIX and Linux servers
i - Businesss Integration. Business in a box.
z - Zero Downtime. "Real" Mainframes are z boxes.
Page 227 of "An Inconvenient Truth":
Much of the forest destruction comes from burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere each year is a result of the burning of brushland for subsistence agriculture and wood fires used for cooking.
Page 217 of "An Inconvenient Truth:"
(a graph showing) 2006 global population: 6.5 billion. 2050 global population: 9.1 billion.
I find it interesting that Gore trumpets the so-called "tipping point" positive feedback theory about the Arctic ice cap melting, leading to more solar absorption, leading to faster melting, while...
Each tree cut down to make space for subsistence agriculture and wood fires not only releases the carbon in the tree, but also removes the tree from the ecosystem, so it isn't there to absorb the just-released carbon (or any other, which it had been faithfully doing since it was a wee little sapling).
Greg Gutfeld had an interesting (and irreverent, which is his specialty) comment on Fox News website. He said we have two problems -- global warming, and overpopulation. He suggested we change our moral value system to encourage cannibalism. Bada bing -- two birds with one stone.
I guess my main point here is that one can justify any position desired, by simply sifting through the "facts" and arranging them according to one's personal agenda. Al Gore now has a nice Nobel prize to show to his grandchildren (who will never, ever need to burn trees for cooking), and the bandwagon is in full motion. I read yesterday that Dell would like to know if I wanted to pay a couple of dollars with the purchase of my laptop to offset the carbon my new toy (er, tool) would release by burning electricity.
A tax by any other name is a tax. Thankfully death will ultimately relieve me of that burden too. (Joe Black notwithstanding).
Not sure what type of data center you are in, but we still need 3-phase power for some of our non-zSeries boxes. Most blade servers require it. Our non-zSeries boxes generate more heat and draw more power than our 2 zSeries servers combined and we only have about 70 small Intel/AMD based system. True you can't run x86 binaries on a zSeries, but you can't run zSeries binaries on a x86 and didn't seem to be a problem when everybody started to migrate away from the mainframe. Why should it be a problem to migrate back? You can run most Linux/POSIX based code by just re-compiling it under Linux on zSeries. Windows code will need to be changed, maybe. I am assuming that you could run WINE under Linux on zSeries and thus that would allow you to run anything that can run under WINE. But I would not want to see what the performance would look like. :)
Now, if you want to run your program under z/OS (one of the operating systems that you can run on zSeries) then you have some code re-writing to do, unless you are running Java code. Which should run with very little if any changes under z/OS.
Unless you are running Linux only, and only truly free Linux based code, and you are running with out support (which you can do on zSeries also) you still need to license software on x86. The licensing fees for z/OS include support also and in some cases upgrades. Whereas Windows based software (especially Windows itself) only includes the ability to run the software and sometimes software upgrades. If you want support you must pay extra and for most Windows based software you have to pay to upgrade.
As for DASD, if you are running Linux only you can connect any SAN that support fiber channel to the mainframe. You only need "special" DASD if you plan to run z/OS.
The System Programming books are for z/OS, not necessarily zSeries. You don't need a z/OS system programmer to run Linux on zSeries.
In some instances you seem to be getting hardware (zSeries) and software (z/OS) requirements mixed up.
Can I earn carbon credits for passing up that jumbo bowl of Montezuma's Revenge Chili at Pedro's Gas N' Go?
I mean, whenever I eat it, I'm definitely venting more greenhouse gasses than most forms of life. What about credits for holding in a generous fart?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
If this continues, I can already visualize the sequel to "Demolition Man":
(FART!)
***BUZZZ***
"John Spartan, you have been fined one credit for the improper venting of greenhouse gasses."
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The only problem with all of this is that you just can't get the kind of consolidation ratios with the mainframe that IBM claims you can. Beleive me, senior management wanted this to be true. And we were put through the meat grinder to try and make it true. It just wasn't. Using software like Zen or VMware on an x86/64 server is way more efficient from an energy consumption perspective as well as a total cost perspective. There really is no comparison at all. I feel sorry for the companies that by into this. Only IBM will be better off in the end.
There is a Sucker Born every minute. Psst! Hey, there Mr Greenie. I just planted 5 Popolars in my back yard and I wanna unload these carbon credits.. You wanna buy them. Please Give me a Break! Have you even seen what some of these Carbon Credit companies do with the money.
Tell you what if you drive an SUV and want 1 years worth of carbon credits Send me 155 dollars us and I will plant 4 loblolly pines on my back 40.
I know this is a sensitive subject, but I've read many posts here referring to carbon (basically C02) as a "pollutant" and I think it's kind of silly. A pollutant is something that creates a quantitative negative impact on the substance to which it's introduced. CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas. Its existence in the atmosphere is not anthropogenic, although recent industrial activity has increased its levels. Plants need it. Like other greenhouse gases such as the much more plentiful (and insidious!) water vapor [evil laugh], it helps keeps the temperature of the earth at a "livable" level. I know this is an emotionally charged issue, with all sides taking part in the cognitive dissonance, group think, research tautology and irrationality, but when I read "pollutant" as referring to C02, I see it as more of a political use than a scientific one. Just my 2 cents as always.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
I've been a fairly staunch opponent of the USA joining any cap and trade emissions system, but, I'm starting to think that, because the USA has so much capital, it could actually do the kinds of investments needed to hit its targets, and actually go under them.
Thus, if the free market in the USA goes on a carbon credit bonanza, the USA would probably transform itself economically towards a low emissions system within about the same time as it rolled out cars, rolled out PCs, and then the internet. Each of those took about a decade, maybe two. So, while the USA might get dinged for a few years on carbon taxes, eventually, instead of paying the Europeans and the third world, the USA would wind up actually taxing the third world for its greenhouse emissions, and likewise Europe. Europe lacks the dynamic market needed to make that kind of big change, and the third world lacks the capital.
So, we conservatives might be completely right and completely wrong at the same time. Global warming IS the biggest ripoff in the history of the world, but, it will be Americans ripping off the rest of the world!
No wonder the Chinese didn't sign!
This is my sig.
My concern is what happens when we lose one of those mainframes with 100 virtual servers on it?
Either you better make sure that system won't go down (impossible given the vicissitudes of hardware), or you have another hot mainframe standing by to spin up all those server images on (and how long will that take?). Does anyone here have experience dealing with disaster recovery in a large-scale virtual server environment?
To paraphrase Mark Twain, "if you're going to keep all your eggs in one basket, you better make sure it is a darn good basket!"
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I find it hard to believe that IBM spent less than $1M on consolidating those 3900 servers onto 30 machines. It just doesn't seem possible.
Infidelity offsets are the new hotness!
http://www.cheatneutral.com/
It's nice to see a reasonable acknowledgement of climatologists' expert position on this matter every once in a while.
There goes the cost of a bottle of beer. If you don't believe me, go do some research on how much CO2 is produced doing the making of beer or wine.
When the yeast first hits the wort, concentrations of glucose (C6H12O6) are very high, so through diffusion, glucose enters the yeast (in fact, it keeps entering the yeast as long as there is glucose in the solution). As each glucose molecule enters the yeast, it is broken down in a 10-step process called glycolysis. The product of glycolysis is two three-carbon sugars, called pyruvates, and some ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which supplies energy to the yeast and allows it to multiply. The two pyruvates are then converted by the yeast into carbon dioxide (CO2) and ethanol (CH3CH2OH, which is the alcohol in beer). The overall reaction is: C6H12O6 => 2(CH3CH2OH) + 2(CO2)
I think it goes something like this.....
SUBTRACT 1 FROM GREENHOUSE-GAS-EMISSIONS
GIVING CLEANER-AIR
Right. Because the economic devestation, not to mention the pure waste of having to rebuild 2/3s of a city (and the attendant pollution with that construction) is completely feasible.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
Let's buy 'credits' from some poor farmer in Chad, and that makes it okay that we're dumping carbon by the TONS into the atmosphere.
I'm not sure how old Abe is, or, for that matter Homer, but FAX machines have been around since ~1900s; perhaps even earlier.
A Fax machine is a lot simpler piece of shit than a phone, or a PC. It's just one step above a teletype or Morse code.
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- aqk
F U
The climate models that the global warning industry rely on, are not accurate now and will not be accurate for a very long time ahead. Its all sheer speculation and money making. Earth atmosphere is simply too complex to be modeled accurately with the current state of computer technology and climatology.
Those folks who tell you their models are accurate should be asked to prove it. They won't as they know it is a snake oil.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/04/eaclimate104.xml
Yes, the talk is about less CO2 but how little ./ readers know about mainframes and business systems overall? Fortunately I see some answers which save the day, thank you. And I want to emphasis their point, if you don't know what mainframes do, go and learn. I could tell you from 70's, 3000+ users, 512KB memory, 1MIPS mainframes (the measuring base for later, IBM 158), 8000+ online applications ( big transactions ), 1 second response times, etc but you have to see it and there are no such things any more. Yes, mainframes are totally different beasts of your super, 3GHz+ PC. Nothing wrong in that but the throughput of those systems is way beyond even large server farms. And, as someone mentioned, nothing new in VM, bring your online systems up for testing in VM, bring your whole OS up, bring one up for coding and unit testing, all old. And we had no problems showing microfilms, faxes, etc in those green terminals. Actually most changed to color later on. And if you really needed graphics, Tektronix or some CAD station for very high definition graphics did that. More expensive at that time, of course, what technology wasn't, but available. And the reliability is really something else, not just availability(HA) or NonStop(Tandem) but they just keep running, software bugs excluded there Tandem may still be better but just a little. I almost forgot, mainframe security is something other systems just dream!
At the very least, they should prevent more businesses setting up shop or expanding in already overcrowded areas.
Problems are getting worse not better, look at london... The transport system is totally overstretched, at peak hours trains and busses are so packed you often can't squeeze onto them at all, and the conditions are utterly terrible.
And what are they doing?
Making it more expensive to drive, so the congestion and conditions on the trains/busses becomes even worse, but the rich people can drive around freely.
Knocking down old offices and apartments and building new bigger office blocks, resulting in even more people crammed into the overcrowded trains.
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If you think the governments of the world are boning you now, just wait for the worthless paper crap called "Carbon Credits." Al Gore can laugh all the way to the bank, and we can cry...
I don't understand your statement. Doing things that cause global warming while doing other things to reduce the carbon footprint DOES eliminate or reduce the problem in the first place. Too many companies are strictly profit maximizing, rather than driven to do the right thing while also being profitable. So, these carbon credits help persuade these companies to do the right thing. In this example, a carbon credit worth $1 million can go a long ways towards persuading a company to replace a power-hungry block of machines with a relatively efficient mainframe. *When they do this, they are saving power and so reducing greenouse gas emissions*. On the other hand, companies that don't want to bother curbing emissions (because, hey, that'd cost money) have to spend cash to buy these credits; if they cut down, they can go from buying them to selling them, which persuades quite a few companies to install pollution control equipment (in the case of factories etc.), reduce power usage, etc. when it's reasonably practical. Carbon credits really are a good thing.
As for your second point, carbon credits don't exclude installing renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc.) If the company can demonstrate they are cutting down on the amount of power they are pulling off the grid (i.e. by showing the much lower power bills and the solar/wind installation..) they would certainly be able to receive carbon credits for this.