James Grimmelmann, Microsoft

James Grimmelmann is a resident of Seattle, Wash., a software design engineer with the Microsoft Corporation, and the madman behind The Laboratorium.

How much power does your computer use? It's probably around 100 watts for a desktop machine, but what does that 100 watts mean? I work in an office with two honking current-guzzlers, and I have a pretty visceral sense of their power usage: I can feel it in the temperature gradient between my office and the hall.

A computer, at heart, is a resistor: a device that turns electricity into heat. By the end of the day, my office has a warm and cozy feeling, thanks to the pair of space heaters under my desk. Our building has a couple of labs, home to rack after rack of machines, running test suites against our code day and night. The air-conditioning in them runs on high full-time; if the HVAC in our building gave out, the lab machines would need to be shut down before the room became uninhabitably hot.

Nor is power free. The figure I've heard is that leaving your computer on overnight releases about a pound of pollutants into the atmosphere, although that figure will vary with your source of electricity.

Of course, the power drain is the least of it. The clean-room manufacturing process needed to make a modern microprocessor requires both a great deal of energy and a great deal of water, both of which have to come from somewhere. And at the other end of its useful life, your computer isn't exactly compostable. The radiation shield in your monitor is made of lead, and other bad-boy elements like mercury and cadmium abound in the chips and connectors making up your motherboard. The computer industry is just beginning to face up to its responsibility in this matter.

For all of this, I'm actually optimistic about the overall impact of computer technology. Part of this belief is pure cynicism: We're such wastrels in other ways that computer-induced waste isn't really the top issue right now. That 100 watts your computer draws is the equivalent of one lightbulb, and the question becomes "are we doing more good with the computer than we would be with the lightbulb?"

My belief is also informed by my experience with life at Microsoft. People have been talking about a paperless office for a long time, but sometime between when I first interned at Microsoft four years ago and now, that paperless office snuck up on us. I haven't printed anything for work purposes in the last six months, I'd say. Status reports, design documents, pay stubs, even all my actual work -- all these things exist solely in email, on servers, on my screen. On the whole, I'm doing far worse by the world's trees through my book-buying habits than I am through my working environment.

And what are we doing at work? We're trying to do in software the kind of things that used to be possible only in some tangible form, with all the attendant waste of stuff. If my expense-report sample does what it's supposed to, nobody will need to use paper expense-report forms again. When Microsoft Research sponsors an interesting lecture, I watch a live video feed -- and can ask questions of the lecturer -- using telepresence software. That conference room is smaller than it would otherwise had to have been, and that's one less shuttle ride. More generally -- and this is a goal of software developers everywhere -- the less time we need to spend doing stupid unnecessary repetitive tasks, the more time we've got free to think, to pay attention to things that matter. Every time someone fixes a bug and our software gets that much more usable, I can focus a little more clearly on what it is I mean to be doing when I use it. It used to take phone calls and 10 minutes of coordination to schedule a meeting; now I can do it in 30 seconds by checking the invitees' calendars online. That's nine and a half fewer minutes wasted on the stupid meeting, nine and a half minutes in which I have a chance to give something valuable back to the world.

Actually, this example is disingenuous. I had a meeting on Monday, and I won't have another until next Monday. This is one thing that drew me to Microsoft: The company understands that we developers work better when we're not being "randomized" all the time. But I think that this observation supports my belief anyway: Pragmatism in clearing away the small details helps enable idealism when considering the bigger picture. Considering such things, for example, as whether the use we're making of a given computer justifies its lightbulb's worth of power, and if not, what to do about it.