nibot ([personal profile] nibot) wrote2007-12-23 12:26 am

fossil fuels

Supposing that we have already passed the time of peak oil production, my question for you is this: in what year will we see fewer cars on California roads than in the previous year?

At what point will the Interstate Highways be fossil roads, abandoned relics, like the decaying steel towns of Pennsylvania, like the Erie Canal?

When will Phoenix be Detroit?

Or will someone invent the coal-powered car and doom us all? (The plug-in Prius actually burns coal.)

[identity profile] surpheon.livejournal.com 2007-12-24 04:42 pm (UTC)(link)
I can blame a lot of my CO2 footprint on server farms - I'm getting flown around to optimize 'em. The cost of running a server farm is high enough that the big guys are seriously looking at optimizing them. You can typically take off 25% of the total (including racks, basically halving the HVAC energy) energy consumption of a server farm if given a cleansheet design, it's easy. (http://hightech.lbl.gov/documents/DATA_CENTERS/06_DataCenters-PGE.pdf) Plus computation is getting more efficient per flop. I'm pretty sure that server farms will be OK (at least 'my' babies will be:)