> Why do we need such a thing?

For starters, growing numbers of companies are required to report on their own emissions, which includes software - and therefore having agreed standards on how to measure this would seem a good way forward to me?

> carbon emissions are also proportional to energy

Reducing energy usage reduces carbon emissions, but they are not proportional. Highly dependent on the grid composition, time of day you draw the energy, and any behind-the-meter infrastructure.

> and all large operators do catalog and reduce GHG emissions.

To take AWS as an example, they still do not report scope 3 emissions for customers (due 'early 2024') - without which, these 'catalogued' numbers are essentially meaningless given how understated they are.

There is a lack of political will to do the screamingly obvious thing and put a price on carbon emissions.

Take OpenAI for example, they decided to skip on paying for content for training their models and by doing so substantially reducing their costs. Does this make ChatGPT more “green”? Does it mean when OpenAI is made to pay for all their copyright infringement that it becomes “less green”?

And what about technology which is controversial, causing a lot of discussions online (all those people spending energy to post comments…)?

I think cost has nothing to do with it.

because the cheapest energy is not necessarily the cleanest

Surely there is in argument to be made that applications targeting a non-native but cross-platform runtime, like webapps, save more power than the devices running them waste. Cross-platform applications mean broader compatibility, so maybe less e-waste? Or perhaps a knock-on effect, like web apps running in browsers are trivially modifyable by extentions like uBO, which skip executing expensive tracking and advertising code that would be very difficult to stip out of a native binary. As a further knock-on, blocking those ads will make the user less likely to buy and have shipped random garbage, which reduces pollution!