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

Full Circle?

[Aereus]

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.

Carbon credits = lame

[Z80xxc!]

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.

Re:Carbon credits = lame

[IamTheRealMike]

the IS NO COST to emitting carbon that anyone can quantify as yet

Sure there is. Just make an organization liable for the costs of climate-change related damage relative to the amount of CO2 it directly emits. You already have to buy carbon credits if you emit CO2 so we have a registry of who emits and how much. This way, the cost is amortized over the whole economy, increasing our ability to manage it (via general price increases).

For instance, let's say that mosquitos start moving up into Europe and spreading various nasty diseases. The health insurance claims for these events can be claimed back from the economy as a whole by suing the CO2 emitters in a class action suit. The details of whether a particular problem was caused or the risk increased by climate change can be thrashed out by the courts. I sense some scepticism in your remarks over whether climate change is real - that's OK, you can believe what you want, but I suspect when put in a court any such defence would have a hard time in the face of a nearly unlimited supply of expert witnesses. The CO2 emitters would be forced to try and calculate the risk to the environment from what they do based on what they believe and the advice their experts give them, and would then pass that on to their customers, thus the "true cost" of climate change would ripple through the economy.

This has benefit over the rather artificial carbon credits market, in that the "cost" of emitting a ton of CO2 is - as you rightly point out - basically pulled out of somebodies arse right now. What's more, they were deliberately set low enough to not have any impact on existing businesses, so instead of bringing about real change they just brought extra democracy. The idea of using markets to take action is the right one, but the "risk premium" needs to be priced into everyday goods.

I just made this scheme up off the top of my head. There are several key objections I can anticipate. The first is that climate change seems likely to kill a lot of people via disease/drought/etc, if indeed it's not doing so already, and how can you price a human life? Well, it is possible, but only in various untasteful ways. I don't think this one is solvable, nor should it detract from the scheme - the market is a tool and we need it to serve us now, to reach our end goals.

The second is that it would be inflationary if enacted globally, at once, because it would lead to a round of general price increases which would then in turn cause more borrowing by those without the spare cashflow to absorb it (ie, most people these days), thus inflating the money supply. This is especially true of essentials like oil (let's ignore peak oil for now). Inflation in the presence of a general price increase is not inevitable assuming you define inflation as an increase in the size of the money supply - that's an artifact of the fractional reserve. Replacing the fractional reserve with something less prone to inflation is certainly a good idea. But, if you suppress inflation (eg, by going to a Robertson/Huber type money supply), a general price increase makes us all poorer. That's more or less inevitable though - we would simply be paying what other people less able to pay (because they just lost their food supply/health/whatever) would be paying anyway, but everyone pays a small amount now instead of watching and saying "I hope that never happens to me". It's not a different concept to insurance in fact, but it's not optional, because climate change affects everyone.

The third is that it requires everybody to act more or less in concert. Unfortunately the "race to the bottom" is a general problem with regulating business and should not discourage us from working together to do so.

There are probably more problems with this scheme, but it does have the advantage that carbon emission is priced "naturally" and integrated into the sticker price of things like a unit of electricity - if you can get yourself out of the CO2 emitters game by replacing your electricity usage with solar or wind (or even nuclear!) then you are no longer liable for potentially huge disaster-relief costs, thus you can lower your prices, gaining an advantage over your competitors.