Pretty much. Being liberal myself, it drives me insane seeing the absolute triple people will buy into. Websites aren't the things to target, let's look at things like cruise ships and transitioning to renewable energy.
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.
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.
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
I personally think it's kind of dumb as hell. I'm not sure how you would know but also websites are a tiny fraction of emissions. If you want to lower emissions it's much more effective to go for legislation local to you.
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.
My website is running off of spare resources on my 10w router, and yet my 30w monitor that I've been using for 10+ years still says that I've saved exactly 0.0 trees every time I turn it on. Thank you, now please fuck off with that bullshit.
Yeah, this goes into the same bin as carbon offset. Just because you had a couple trees planted in one part of the world you should not be allowed to polute the rivers in another part of the world.
And it only appears to check the size of downloaded assets and then whether the hosting provider is known to use renewables. Indeed not terribly exhaustive or useful.
Out of curiosity I've let it rate Low<-Tech Magazine, a website run on an ARM SBC powered exclusively with off-grid solar power, and that only achieves 87% / A.
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.
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.
Marketing bullshit that appeals to some low-information, vibes-based liberals.
Greenwashing for profit.
Pretty much. Being liberal myself, it drives me insane seeing the absolute triple people will buy into. Websites aren't the things to target, let's look at things like cruise ships and transitioning to renewable energy.
Greenwashing, can't believe this even is a question
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.
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.
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
How so?
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:
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.
I don't think anything could outweigh the carbon emissions of having to drive to the office.
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. 😛
Single car traffic is sadly intertwined with working-on-location where I live
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
Aaaah, yes, if we assume everything else to be equal, then of course having the admin work from home makes a positive impact.
Personally I hope those mouth breathers save some carbon for the rest of us. Green Certification is a complete joke.
I personally think it's kind of dumb as hell. I'm not sure how you would know but also websites are a tiny fraction of emissions. If you want to lower emissions it's much more effective to go for legislation local to you.
So uh. What the fuck does that mean?
Stupid and meaningless.
If I had to take a wild guess giving benefit of the doubt it checks the total bytes downloaded and CPU usage to estimate electricity usage.
With a combination of checking which data centers its hosted out of and if they are using certified renewable energy etc
Yes it checks whether the data centers bought their green, green washed, or green washed plus premium package.
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.
If this encourages light, fast loading pages, I'm all for it.
The future is no JavaScript!!
I wish.
It was kind of a joke response.
What the hell is a green website
https://www.vandelaydesign.com/green-websites/
Those are green websites /s
Probably a better unit of measurement than this green washed bullshit.
My website is running off of spare resources on my 10w router, and yet my 30w monitor that I've been using for 10+ years still says that I've saved exactly 0.0 trees every time I turn it on. Thank you, now please fuck off with that bullshit.
But he pays people who weren't going to cut down their trees to not cut down their trees so he can have a carbon neutral jet!
(The above sentence is an example of sarcasm.)
I wish he would pay me not to cut down my trees.
Whatever it is, it’s a joke. Things like this just take the focus off the people actually causing the problem.
Yeah, this goes into the same bin as carbon offset. Just because you had a couple trees planted in one part of the world you should not be allowed to polute the rivers in another part of the world.
Is it too difficult to post some context?
This appears to be the calculator: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
And it only appears to check the size of downloaded assets and then whether the hosting provider is known to use renewables. Indeed not terribly exhaustive or useful.
Out of curiosity I've let it rate Low<-Tech Magazine, a website run on an ARM SBC powered exclusively with off-grid solar power, and that only achieves 87% / A.
Link to results
That is because they didn't pay their membership fee
Eheh nice one to test! If there's a 100% it should be that one
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.
If ESG is anything to go by, just a greenwashing fad they'll drop as soon as it doesn't have the desired effect
The Carbon footprint of a website is hard to determine and given the examples posted in this thread, I would not trust their conclusions.
relevant if it sabotages coal mining infrastructure
It is about as useful as a bullshit milkshake is to a vegan.
Huh?
How tf can my website produce less than 0g pf emissions?
Ecosia plants trees for every search request. So technically it removes co2 every time you visit the site.
stupid but if it removes useless bloat and data farming im for it
We are getting dumber
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.
We can have a real impact by focusing hard enough on 0.00001% of the problem!
Oh wait, no, we can't.
There are lots folks and lots of problems. We don’t have to focus. We can work on many aspects at the same time, big and small.
That's fucking stupid.
HTTP, serving properly tagged semantic HTML file, with optional styling via CSS, and if you really want JavaScript for animations and live updates.
Thank you.
I've never seen an example of "properly tagged semantic HTML" or truly optional CSS outside of toy examples meant to illustrate the concept.
But it doesn't matter, because serving website content is an utterly insignificant to contributor to global warming.
BBC is good example of semantic web
A lot of websites use html tags correctly, especially some of the better news websites
Virtue signalling at its worst. It's completely meaningless.
ecosia
I wouldn’t visit a website that had that, and if it was a company, I’d stop using their product.