Cloud can reduce greenhouse emissions, but don't assume it's automatic "Organizations can't just outsource their environmental challenges to public cloud providers," analyst firm Gartner has warned. In a report published last month titled "Quick Answer: How Green Are Public Cloud Providers?" Gartner concluded that opting for cloud storage over traditional legacy datacenters can cut associated …
If you want to save the World, stop making kids, or no more than one per person.
Thankfully that is a process that seems to happen naturally as wealth increases, albeit barely fast enough.
"no more than one per person" is 2 per couple or less, and pretty much all "western" countries are below that (I believe the US is the big exception). The faster growing countries in Asia and Africa have all slowed down a lot in the last 2 decades, and AFAIK, UN projections for 'peak human' are at around 9 billion before 2100
Yes, population growth is mostly linear now rather than exponential, and it is due to people not dying rather than people being born.
eg if people previously lived to 40, and now live to 80, and have enough children to replace themselves when they die, population will double over the course of 40 years, then stabilise at that higher level.
Scale, if perfect, has diminishing returns, and usually has some costs of its own, such as inertia, loss of control ... and someone else's profit margin.. This is true of all outsourcing, and The Cloud does not magically escape this.
Prediction: by 2030 at the latest you'll be able to get a petabyte and a couple of thousand vCPU in a single liquid cooled rack that doesn't even have to be in an aircon hall, and you can use the hot water it generates on premise. Your cloud provider will take far longer to replace their now relatively inefficient kit, simply because they have so much of it (the aforementioned inertia) and, having fewer staff per megawatt of waste heat, will continue to vent most of that into the environment.
Scale makes things look greener than they are unless you are scrupulous about the additional environmental costs of operating at scale.
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