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?"

Comments

Re:Carbon credits = lame

[ErroneousBee]

My last remark in that comment was based on my immediate perception of the USA from Europe, sorry.

Hmmm... Let's list the first nation with an emission test for vehicles. (California 1966, USA 1968)
How about the first legislation on auto manufacturers for fuel efficiency (USA 1975)
Now, just to be sure, let's list the top five carbon emitting nations - per capita.

Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Luxembourg, Trinidad and Tobago (weird)

I hope this helps to change your perception. Granted, some of our policies are misguided, or downright stupid, but that's a lot different than intentionally negligent.

Actually, lets list them all

And lets observe that the top 9 have a population of about 12million, and are all island, desert or city states.
Let us also observe that the major European states (UK, Germany, France, Spain) all have half the per-capita figures of the USA.

The reason the US eneacted those laws before Europe is because Europe was going for small and efficient anyway (E.g. by producing the Mini and VW beetle, and there was already pressures on fuel efficiency via fuel taxes and fuel rationing (during the war).

This attempt at spinning the figures, plus trying to shift the focus away from yourselves and small countries, most of whom are producing oil for the industrialised nations anyway, will only reinforce many perceptions about Americans.