Good, Better, Best: How Sustainable Should Computing Be?

Increasing numbers of uncontrolled wildfires and extreme weather events have inspired new awareness and activism around climate change. This awareness has reached a broad range of computing communities, such as software and system developers, cloud operators, researchers and academics, policymakers, and increasingly business executives. As financial pressures on climate risk and reputation grow, computing industry executives have made new commitments to reduce carbon emissions and impact. Computing communities need to help he grid decarbonize, shaping computing activity to accelerate the addition of renewables and more important, the effective absorption of such renewable generation! The grid faces major challenges to decarbonize, and we can and should help accelerate the process.