
Ask HN - CO2 emissions and cloud computing - jagira
Who is responsible for the CO2 generated by cloud infrastructure? The company which is consuming it or the cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon or Rackspace.<p>And who will be taxed for those emissions?
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dstein
Given that datacenters are powered by electricity, the amount of CO2 would
depend on how the electricity was produced. Since the utility company
providing the electricity is responsible for how it is produced any CO2 taxes
should be paid by them.

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jagira
What if they are not liable to pay CO2 taxes?

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dstein
Levying taxes on emissions any other way would be a nightmare to implement
fairly, be very inefficient, and would be ripe for abuse and fraud. The whole
carbon credit system is about the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

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mooism2
In any sane system, the CO2 emitter would be taxed --- the electricity
generation company. This would be the same as the cloud provider if they
generated their own electricity and that caused CO2 emissions.

Do you have any specific CO2 tax regime in mind? EU? US?

If you mean who is responsible in a moral sense, all three are responsible to
some degree, as are the consuming company's customers.

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jagira
Let us assume that the provider's data center is in country like Saudi Arabia,
where there is no carbon tax and the provider does not include the carbon
offset charges in the invoice.

Would it make sense for an enterprise (EU/US) to have its entire IT infra
hosted by such cloud provider and save some carbon tax?

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Yana_Convelife
Interesting question. I think it should be the company that use it, but Amazon
can collect those taxes with its fees and pass them on, like with sales tax.

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jagira
What if Amazon is not accounting the emissions while billing them?

