Plus, it ignores that most websites couldn’t reliably tell you how much carbon emissions they’d be responsible for individually. That’s a super-complicated question to answer.
A website managed by a person working from home are way greener than a website managed from an office, I hope they include that in their green certification
I mean you put it as a generic thing which means it’s independent of other details, including a “way” so you suggest it’s a significant difference clearly. This must be based on detailed data or research, right? Care to share that?
Because otherwise, I have a few questions:
Is the whole supply chain included? Developer, Ops, Admin, Data Center, cabling, everything? Or just the legally mentioned admin on the page, respectively the lawyer?
What if the page from home (and the whole home!) is running on hardware that gets electricity from fossil fuels + cooks with gas while the office and it’s page all run on renewables?
What if the page deployed from home is written extremely ineffective, so it uses multiple times more electricity?
What if the office in question is the back office of a pet shop? Or a supermarket? Or a DIY superstore? They’d heat the place either way, so why not also deploy the website from there?
And don’t get me wrong, I’m a staunch supporter of closing down offices as possible. But generalizations such as these help no one, and also just like the OP completely miss the point of talking about carbin emissions and climate impacts.
Yeah but that’s making the assumption that someone drives to the office.
And also immediately points the finger at car-based single-person traffic, not office-based work. And I want offices closed down as possible, so please keep the finger on them. 😛
So you have two identical websites, down to the cable materials, distance of workers and everything else. Basically a 1 to 1 clone. One website has one person not going to office to manage the site, the other website does not. Even if that person is only WFH one day a year compared to the other that is two trips not driven.
Many people here in Sweden that doesn’t live in a big city has quite some distance to work with no viable mass transit options (you are no longer allowed to ride on the school busses where I live which means that the closest bus station is 18 km from me) which requires a car.
Most of our electricity comes from water with other renewables constantly developing, so I don’t think the electricity source would matter much since it’s not server hosting.
Edit: my first post was also in jest while agreeing with it being super complicated with an almost infinite amount of hard to measure variables to boil down to a single digit or letter
Part of the issue is that electricity is fungible. If I consume one watt-hour from my grid, I don’t get to decide where it comes from. The mix of generation is the same for everyone on that grid. Even if you segregate the grids in order to vaguely guarantee that you are only consuming green sources, you’re also making the “dirty” grid cheaper and thus easier for everyone else to use, and there are plenty of ways of capitalizing on that difference that nullifies the segregation. It’s a bit like arbitrage.
I think the joke here is that in Super Mario Bros (NES), the bushes are recolored clouds, with their bottoms hidden by the ground. By changing the reference to Skyrim, you get a surrealist joke.
Anyway, that’s what I thought the reference was and it made me heartily lol!
For all the comments that say “the real problem is…”: this is crisis and working on all emission sources contributes to a solution not just the biggest emitters.
Everything we online has an impact in the real world and there’s some value in reminding people that. And yes, some sites could be causing a lot emissions than others.
Some are powered by solar, others by coal.
ARM chips are more energy efficient than x86 and so on.
You can invent the worlds most energy efficient CPU, put it on every server rack in the world, and all your progress will be undone by that one billionaire who decides they want international taco bell at 3 AM.
On the other hand, you can approach the dramatic cut of emissions from both angles, as in “you are not legally able to do what you want as long as you can pay for it, and you have the responsibility in minimizing emissions”.
Internet does generate a lot of emissions. Streaming quality, website size. Whatever we do to reduce the energy demand is a good idea, as long as we don’t think of it as " The Solution", but as part of a wide range of actions aimed at slashing energy consumption.
That tells us almost nothing about a website’s carbon impact. I could serve a 4k uhd movie from my personal website and it wouldn’t even be 1% of the impact from Reddit for 1 second. We need to know how much traffic a site gets for those numbers to matter.
While I understand and agree with you, the obvious counterargument is how many people get serviced and the generated value of them being served. I mean people won’t argue that a car is better than a bus because the car produces less carbon. What I think is the better way to highlight the ridiculousness of those icons, a newspaper website produces more carbon (if energy source is producing carbon) than a server that just return the certification icon. So newspaper website is worse? That is how this certification works… Low information density gets rewarded. Which is contra productive if the goal is an energy efficient web.
To be fair, the service in the screenshot, tries to estimate the average carbon over the year and collects data to improve estimated that counter some of my critic, but it doesn’t fix the ignorance to the kind of data provided and rewards low data density to some degree
Same as "carbon footprint" - meaningless greenwashed bullshit there to shift focus away from those responsible, and the true scale of the damage they're causing for money.
If anything - seeing that kind of certification would make me actively avoid a company because you know they're at best using it to virtue signal for profits, at worst and more likely, they're using it to cover up much much worse shit they're doing.
Mostly seems a bit silly but I think if people were making any sort of large decisions based on it, I would probably raise an eyebrow. But I like the idea of people considering the environmental impact of everything they do. Crypto Bros sure could’ve used that lesson.
It’s not like it’s doing any harm unless people put too much stock into it. Like the energy star rating on my HVAC unit - it’s just information to me. It’s not like I’m making major decisions based off of it or getting the feel goods. No reason this can’t be like that.
Exactly. It also gives you an annual estimate of the electric costs. I have no idea how accurate it is, but since they all use the same rating, I can at least compare on the fly if I am so inclined.
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