It's almost certain one developer generates more CO2 than any reasonable number of servers that run their code.
I'm not so sure. Let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate.
Assume a single really hefty server that consumes 1 kilowatt. Over one year, this is about 10,000 kw hr. 1 kw hr of electricity produced by a coal fired plant generates about 1 kg of CO2 (https://carbonpositivelife.com/co2-per-kwh-of-electricity/). Thus that big server running for a year produces about 10 metric tons of CO2.
An average American lifestyle (all in, total country production divided by population, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...) involves the production about about 20 tons of CO2 per year. So if you write code that full-time on more than 2 really big servers per year, your code might be producing more CO2 than the rest of your lifestyle.
I'm guessing that most of the errors in this are probably overestimating the code's CO2 (probably not coal fired, probably less than 1 kw, a year is less than 10,000 hours), so more realistically maybe it's 4-8 servers to be break-even? Still, I think it's fair to say that there are some participants in this forum whose running code probably generates more CO2 than the rest of their lifestyle.
I'm not so sure. Let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate.
Assume a single really hefty server that consumes 1 kilowatt. Over one year, this is about 10,000 kw hr. 1 kw hr of electricity produced by a coal fired plant generates about 1 kg of CO2 (https://carbonpositivelife.com/co2-per-kwh-of-electricity/). Thus that big server running for a year produces about 10 metric tons of CO2.
An average American lifestyle (all in, total country production divided by population, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...) involves the production about about 20 tons of CO2 per year. So if you write code that full-time on more than 2 really big servers per year, your code might be producing more CO2 than the rest of your lifestyle.
I'm guessing that most of the errors in this are probably overestimating the code's CO2 (probably not coal fired, probably less than 1 kw, a year is less than 10,000 hours), so more realistically maybe it's 4-8 servers to be break-even? Still, I think it's fair to say that there are some participants in this forum whose running code probably generates more CO2 than the rest of their lifestyle.