Green thinking and software, can it be for real?

I woke up very early this morning, because my computer had started humming a lot. I checked what was the matter, and a piece of software I use every day had caught itself in an infinite loop, with the CPU utilization running at 100%.

I'm not sure how long it had been doing so before I woke up, but it got me thinking. During that malfunction, how many cents of electricity and how many grams of fossile fuels were wasted because the software malfunctioned?

Most people think that software is inherently green, because there's no waste. But, software runs the world, and creating software can be a major consumer of energy. As a software developer, you might still not view yourself as being part of the "save a tree" campaing. Furthermore, do you need to take part in the global climate discussions? My opinion is that, yes, you do. This is because software, even if it is itself "clean", it isn't produced cleanly, or doesn't consume any resources at run-time.

Instead, turn your thinking the other way around. For example, optimizing software can be thought of as a green act, because it can save CPU cycles, hard disk and memory. If you can't see the benefits on your own computer, think about copying your creation to 100 million computers. The numbers will add up!