The world’s addiction to fossil fuels is a “Frankenstein’s monster sparing nothing and no one”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, told leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.
“Our fossil fuel addiction is a Frankenstein’s monster, sparing nothing and no one. All around us, we see clear signs that the monster has become master,” Guterres said in a speech days after 2024 was revealed to have been the hottest year on record and Donald Trump began his second term as US president by pulling the country out of the Paris climate agreement and pledging to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas. The fossil fuel industry gave $75m (£60m) to Trump’s campaign.
Guterres said: “What we are seeing today – sea-level rise, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and wildfires – are just a preview of the horror movie to come.”
I’m a self-hoster and self-admitted energy-addict.
On one hand, I think getting away from corporate control, self-hosting, and data archival are important, on the other hand they are also deeply resource intensive.
I think in the future whether we like it or not personal computing as we know it might go the away simply due to energy constraints and it may be more like if people are lucky they have a small, low-powered command line device like a Raspberry Pi, probably with very high latency.
I self-host and my server runs at about 3% of what my aircons consume on a summer day.
It’s just one CPU, a PoE switch and some spinning drives. There seems to be an awful lot of waste in computing these days. Just don’t do wasteful things on the server like VMs, containers and desktops.