still testing this out/trying to figure out how to phrase it: maybe we should just focus on the electricity and water use of computation instead of extrapolating to carbon because 1) companies flimflam with offsets/power purchase agreements and 2) a future of net zero carbon electricity sources will necessarily be constrained

@ingrid Focussing on electricity ignores all of the energy - the majority of which is direct from fossil fuels, rather than electricity (renewable or otherwise) - involved in production.

It's much harder to power mining, transportation and industrial processes with electricity than it is datacentres and offices.

For consumer devices, production is approx 80% of the lifetime GHG cost. It's less for infrastructure that runs 24/7, but is still far too substantial to ignore...

@sy totally, though in this case I'm specifically thinking about how to target the ongoing dodge of large (ostensibly) software companies who I think can probably be more effectively held to account for data center consumption than other parts of the supply chain

@ingrid While the cloud platform model provides a convenient excuse for those who're 'just renting' hardware, pretending that all the datacentre hardware which runs their software (and the network hardware that connects people to that) somehow isn't a totally necessay part of their system, so it's outside the boundary we draw seems to me to concede too much.