Building Green Software

Chapter 13. Where Do We Go from Here?

Don’t Panic!

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Perhaps we should have had the Douglas Adams quote on the cover of this book because we’re not doomers. We believe humanity will adapt to and mitigate climate change and survive and then thrive on our new renewable power sources.

However, not all enterprises, organizations, or software systems will. They will have to adapt or die, as the saying goes.

The good news is that our industry is beginning to wake up. Five years ago, it was controversial to talk about green software at a tech conference because the subject was seen as “political.” Now, you would have to be somewhat behind the times (another British understatement) to think adopting green software was anything but a pragmatic move.

The purpose of this book is a practical one. We want to help folk create systems that can handle the transition from the highly dependable, seasoned, but carbon-intensive, fossil-fueled electricity grids of the past to the new renewably powered ones of the future. In addition, those systems need to use hardware more efficiently.

Warning

As an aside, you may have noticed we made no attempt in this book to convince anyone of the reality of climate change. If you don’t see any cause for concern in the famous hockey stick graph of global temperature rises over the past millennia, you aren’t part of our target audience.

As we said at the beginning, the energy transition isn’t going to last forever. ...