Thought this was interesting...
The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/
I'll have to take some time and read that carefully, indeed an interesting premise. I work daily in the cloud and I wonder about the net carbon damage.
There are web search engines like ecosia that use their revenue to plant trees
https://www.ecosia.org I do wonder though if eventually having cloud computing will improve the net carbon footprint, because outsourcing computation to a service that incentivizes off-peak use (when hydroelectric etc has excess power) would encourage some improved practices. Furthermore, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) bare the cost of electricity and will be more likely to choose efficient chipsets (most recent processor improvements have yielded dramatically lower electricity consumption).
Not to mention as an end-user you get billed for each unit of compute/networking/etc so it makes you far more aware when developing your software - that being said, compute is cheaper than your time so sometimes you just end up throwing more money at the problem.
These days it's also much cheaper/effective to rent space on a computer than buying a server say for example for home use, so there may be a net reduction in carbon emissions if people do more of their computing workloads in the cloud.
As a customer, you could also make the choice to host your servers in Quebec (Hydro Electricity) instead of say NB (if we had data centres
) which uses some coal.
That being said, not all uses of computing is efficient or arguably necessary; bitcoin mining for example is a huge waste of resources.
