On the Promise and Pitfalls of Optimizing Embodied Carbon

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential benefits and risks of focusing on reducing embodied carbon in computing infrastructure to combat climate change, emphasizing the need for careful incentive alignment.

Contribution

It highlights both the opportunities and challenges of optimizing embodied carbon, aiming to guide more effective and responsible climate strategies in computing.

Findings

Optimizing embodied carbon can incentivize infrastructure efficiency.

Focusing on embodied carbon may overstate actual reductions.

It can complicate incentives for operational carbon reduction.

Abstract

To halt further climate change, computing, along with the rest of society, must reduce, and eventually eliminate, its carbon emissions. Recently, many researchers have focused on estimating and optimizing computing's \emph{embodied carbon}, i.e., from manufacturing computing infrastructure, in addition to its \emph{operational carbon}, i.e., from executing computations, primarily because the former is much larger than the latter but has received less research attention. Focusing attention on embodied carbon is important because it can incentivize i) operators to increase their infrastructure's efficiency and lifetime and ii) downstream suppliers to reduce their own operational carbon, which represents upstream companies' embodied carbon. Yet, as we discuss, focusing attention on embodied carbon may also introduce harmful incentives, e.g., by significantly overstating real carbon reductions and complicating the incentives for directly optimizing operational carbon. This position paper's purpose is to mitigate such harmful incentives by highlighting both the promise and potential pitfalls of optimizing embodied carbon.