Re: [Fsfe-uk] ZDNet Carbon-neutral PC runs Vista (not Free software)

[Chris Croughton]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 01:13:30PM +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-09-17 at 12:05 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> > It seems so-called green taxes may be useless in changing buying habits.
> > 
> > Point of information: the different levels of road tax/vehicle excise
> > duty/road fund licence pricing are having no effect on Europe yet:
> > "CO_2 emission rates from *new cars* are down by just 0.2 percent on
> > last year" [p73, The Observer Magazine, 16 September 2007].
> > 
> > Or would it change if a green tax was payable on purchase price,
> > clearly labelled?
> 
> I think one of the big problems is that it's not possible to boil
> 'degree of eco-friendliness' down into star rating or something like
> washing machines or something, making it difficult to see how you could
> set such a tax in a way which rewarded that type of purchasing decision.

Exactly.  A fridge or freezer can have its energy consumption estimated
fairly accurately (to within a factor of 2 or so, exceptions are rare).
A computer or car can't, not within an order of magitude or more.

> A lot of what determines how friendly the car is comes from the type of
> use it receives: e.g., my Saab is a terrible car for urban driving,
> getting something like 15mpg on a bad day. But, I never use it for that,
> it does motorway miles and achieves 40mpg pretty easily.

I hate going into town in the car.  On average I get around 50mpg in my
normal driving, in town I get 20mpg and I can see the average going
down in just one round trip (lots of stop/start and low gear use).

> Similarly, how 'green' a PC is doesn't just depend on how much energy
> was used to manufacture it, or how much energy it uses when turned on. A
> big server is terribly power-hungry, but if it's powering 20 thin
> clients is it suddenly 'green'?

Arguably, yes, because its cost is shared.  Assuming that the thin
clients' usage is negligible compared to that of the server (I don't
know how true that is, a lot of the power goes into the display and you
need one per client).

Are there any figures available for how the power changes with use?  For
instance, how does it change between a hard drive just spinning,
spinning up and down with "power saving", and seeking all over the place
trying to serve multiple clients?  Processors are easier, they can go
from low power modes to full capacity fast and presumably with little
excess power, so they can be throttled immediately usage drops, but
disks take time (and energy) to change state.

> I think you can 'green tax' the manufacture of goods (that is, try to
> link the cost of items with the environmental cost of making them), but
> I don't think they will be much use at changing buying habits or
> informing people which is the 'greenest' good to buy in their situation.

Also remember that people buy what they consider they need for what they
want to do.  I wouldn't even bother mentioning *ix to a lot of the
people I know, because they play games or use other software which is
only available for Windows (yes, they could run VMWare or whatever and
run Windows in that, but the power usage wouldn't go down).  It would be
the same as telling a farmer that he should buy a Prius instead of his
combine harvester.

> Thinking about cars again, I reckon atm I spend about ??500 pa in fuel
> duty alone (excluding VAT). It would have to be a hefty green tax
> upfront to offset the running costs based on fuel, and I think the
> running cost tax is a lot fairer. I'd personally like to see most of the
> costs of motoring (road fund, insurance, etc.) all linked into the
> actual running of the vehicle personally, at least partially. 

To an extent many insurance companies do that, they take account of the
mileage per year which has a similar effect.  If they took off the road
tax completely and put it on fuel I wouldn't mind.

Chris C