This sounds extremely regressive. Basically rich developers will all be getting a huge property tax break by not having to pay taxes on the value of the land/building improvements, while small businesses and homeowners who can not afford to improve their property (or extract profit from it) will not be able to keep up with rising land taxes and be forced to sell. What a stupid idea.
Ever hear of electric heating? How on earth would you expect solar or wind to be used for heating. It's far from the cheapest option currently, but you're not getting rid of fossil fuels without electric heat.
I do sometimes work nights, but not in a factory. But your missing the point, there are lots of industrial processes that you don't just turn off for 12 hours because the electricity is not there or more expensive. Spooling them back up can take far in excess of that, so a 50% duty cycle is a non-starter.
I'm sorry we can't all be laptop-class software devs, someone has to make the 'stuff'.
I don't think the fact that it can be enabled/disabled by environmental variable indicates malicious intent. It could be as simple as that Intel doesn't care to test there compiler optimizations on competitors' CPU's. If have to distribute two types of binaries (one which were optimized but could break, vs un-optimized and unlikely to break), I would default over to distributing the un-optimized version. Slow is better than broken.
I understand some end users may not be able to re-compile the application for there machines, but I wouldn't say its Intel's fault, but rather the distributors of that particular application. For example, if AMD users want Solidworks to run faster on their system, they should ask Dassault Systemes for AMD-optimized binaries, not the upstream compiler developers!
Anyways, for those compiling their own code, why would anyone expect an Intel compiler to produce equally optimized code for an AMD cpu? Just use gcc/clang or whatever AMD recommends.
Yeah, its pretty unrealistic to imagine any zero-Carbon approach which excludes nuclear. But the greens would rather cover their eye/hears about that, and imagine that it can all be done with wind and solar (in northern europe of all places).