Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits 316
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?"
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:5, Informative)
Currently the market does not integrate the cost of emitting carbon in the atmosphere. As a result the carbon emitting technologies seem to be less expensive for the same result and the market logically develops these. Introducing a feedback in the market that the carbon emissions actually has a cost sends a message saying that carbon emitting tech is not the most efficient choice. The market will find an alternative solution instead of a solution being forced on it which might not be the most efficient in the end.
You mention that you want to eliminate the problem in the first place then you mention solar power, but how do you know that solar power is the best, or that nuclear power is? Maybe it's wind based, or ethanol based, or hydrogen based power or even cattle based power that's the most efficient. Or maybe a company will start doing research because there is a market for it and someone will come up with a transimentional p0rn energy extractor or even an Anonymous Coward based power source, who knows ?
The thing is the market will integrate the feedback signal and propagate it. This avoids forcing decisions on the market about the solution, the certificates are only reminding it of the problem. Going for carbon-netural server-farm is simply passing along the signal back to energy producers.
It looks like it's working for other problems.IIRC sulfur dioxid emission certificates led companies who claimed that installing an emission cleaner for it cost too muuch to actually install them even though buying the certificates seemed to cost less. the real price (vs company reported) of installing the cleaner was less than trading certificates in the long term thus they ended up investing.
Let's hope it will work for carbon too.
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:4, Informative)
Or are you just talking about "global Warming"? Even then the push for electric cars, hybrids, alternative energy and so on seems to be good for the environment to some degree.
Of course programs like the hazardous material superfund and such that clean up toxic waist from generations removed are good for the environment too. And then there is the wetlands restoration projects where the guberment is buying up large lots of developed and otherwise exploited lands and turning them back into watersheds and wildlife habitats. Or the more recent oceanic conservations project from 2006 [msn.com] that has been called "the single-largest act of ocean conservation in history."
Well maybe you should expand on that comment before I go off on a tangent. It isn't exactly waist land 10 miles outside every city. The US has a pretty good track record on the environment and has been making improvements since the 70's when everyone else started waking up to the effects of some of the old ways of doing things. We have tough laws to keep the environment in good condition and we have on ongoing efforts to toughen those laws and make it better. Including the attempts to get this credit BS going.
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:2, Informative)
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2005/12/28/2238 [arstechnica.com]
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:4, Informative)
To get the credit market to work, you need to make sure there are higher demand than supply, that should not be hard.
Here (in Norway) the state will not issue any "free" credits to the industry.
The state will sell credits for up to 85% of our current emission levels, above that the industry will have to buy credits abroad or reduce their emissions.
Reduction abroad will in many cases be less expensive than domestic reductions (both because the implementation cost will be lower in a developing country, but also because the cheaper "early" improvements already has been done at home). As long as credits bought from abroad reduces emissions where they were bought, the system works.
There are also individuals and organizations positioning themselves to buy up credits without any intentions of using them.
The credit system will be make sure that existing emission-reduction technology will be implemented as soon as the credit price rise above a certain level. What it will not ensure is funding for long term research into new solutions.
Research into new energy sources and emission-reduction technology still needs heavy governmental support. A good start would be 1% of GDP for all industrialized countries.
The nonsense about the carbon credit system being a wealth redistribution system is just stupid.
Giving / implementing emission-reduction technology to the industry in the developing is in no shape or form redistribution of wealth, it's saving our bacon.
And remember, a large part of the industry in the developing countries is owned by multinationals, if the carbon credit system did not include those countries, all that would happen is that even more of the worlds production would "globalize".
Re:Full Circle? (Score:2, Informative)
People get this idea that raw number crunching is all that mainframes do. It's the massive I/O backplane, people....
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:Full Circle? (Score:5, Informative)
Please remember that in computing, nothing new has been invented since 1970.
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:3, Informative)
2.) The US has signed (but not ratified) Kyoto.
For more on my first point, as I understand it kyoto caps industrialized countries, but not many other polluting countries. China is the best example of an "exempt" country, and is indeed the stated reason for the US not ratifying the treaty. China's emissions at this point are stated as having exceeded the US.
The end result of this, and I think we all know it, is that if the US was to ratify and abide by the treaty, large numbers of US (and non-US, for that matter) corporations would move their polluting industry to China. How, exactly, does this reduce global emissions?
Re:Actually no. (Score:4, Informative)
That "inefficient" wood is not contributing at all to global warming. When you cut down and burn a tree, you're releasing the stored carbon of that tree. As other trees grow, that carbon is re-absorbed, and released when that tree is cut down in turn. It's all part of the current carbon cycle.
The problem with stuff like coal and oil is that they represent carbon which has been out of the cycle for millions of years. When you burn them, you're adding more carbon to the cycle than the world's forests can cope with. Deforestation (which is primarily caused by wealthier civilizations, rather than poor ones with no means to cut down forests on a large scale) only accentuates this.
Slash-and-burn agriculture is ecologically destructive, but it doesn't contribute to the carbon problem. Like burning trees, it's all part of the current carbon cycle. As the land lies fallow and the forest regenerates (prior to the next round of slash-and-burn) the carbon released is reabsorbed. As I said, it causes other ecological problems, like soil erosion and habitat destruction, but it's no more a contributing factor to global warming than any other method of turning woodland into farmland.
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:2, Informative)
Therefore, Luxemburg has the statistics of a country with many times it's real population, which usually inflates per-capita indexes.
Re:Full Circle? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Full Circle? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:First, price a mainframe... not an exciting opt (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Carbon credits = lame (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CO2_per_capita_per_country.png [wikipedia.org]
There you go, emissions, per capita, of the whole world. Nicely colour coded. Lets see the neo-cons try to weasel out of that one.