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> The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. M
by messo 6y ago
> The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view.
Maybe this is what finally could push companies towards making lighter and more efficient websites? At least an estimate of a webpages watt usage (server and client side).
- mehrdadn 6y ago> The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Holy cow, that is a lot. 1-3 grams of CO2 per single load of a page? Makes me feel guilty about even clicking the article.
- dtech 6y agoThat is not a lot. it's about 4mWh for coal power. In comparison, leaving a 300W computer setup on for 10 hours each day with coal power is 3KWh or 2.5kg of CO2.
- akiselev 6y agoSo it takes the computing power equivalent of a 300W PC running for 10 hours to serve a thousand page views? At 50 req/page view, that server is handling ~1.5 requests per second. That kind of throughput can be handled by a RaspberryPi, so are we seriously wasting 95%+ of the power budget routing packets and idling servers?
- ben_w 6y agoA million, not a thousand. Milliwatt-hours to kilowatt-hours.
- baaym 6y agoWhen I reached the bottom of the page it even loaded an extra article. Now that's a real waste of CO2.
- abbe98 6y agoSending a short email is estimated to release 4g CO2: https://phys.org/news/2015-11-carbon-footprint-email.html https://phys.org/news/2015-11-carbon-footprint-email.html
- pjc50 6y agoThe average human breathes out 1g of CO2 every minute and a half. By comparison, average UK cars put out 124.5g for every km driven. It's not nothing, but it's not a lot either. It probably is worth evaluating the electrical efficiency of the tech industry as a whole, both in terms of highly executed code hotspots and entire pieces of business of questionable utility (ad javascript, cryptocurrency proof-of-waste), but individual web pages are the plastic straws of the industry compared to the giant flare stacks of real problems.
- maelito 6y agoAds and all the services that make a modern Web page should be included in the estimation.
- aembleton 6y agoIt's the equivalent of driving 19 metres in an average UK car. That's not far, but that is for a single web page. That seems incredibly high to me.
- reportgunner 6y agoWhat is the comparison of the number of cars in the world versus the number of people in the world ?
- pjc50 6y agoEstimates of vehicles in use (including commercial) seem to be about 1.2 billion. But the relevant number is surely total miles driven?
- sephamorr 6y agoI'm having a very hard time rationalizing these numbers. Something has to have some very poor assumptions: Let's assume each page load is ~1mbit, and it's being served from 1000km away. 1mbit may be low, but most of it will presumably be content delivered by a CDN which is far closer than 1000km. The reference design (which I work on) for 400G DWDM systems are ~100W for 2 transceivers + EDFA + switches, for a standard 80km link. Assuming we hop every 80km (which should be conservative here), we get 3mJ for the energy through the network. The previous generation is probably 10x worse, so ~30mJ. Let's add the endpoint too; Wifi router + cable modem (12W or rather 3W marginal power since it's running anyway/ 200mbit) = 15mJ And finally for the server. I'd hope the server could do 1k requests per second, and that should amortize against backends, etc (2k RPS, but frontend + DB backend server, maybe), maybe 150W for the server, so 150mJ. This gives us 200mJ for a page load. Using California's current (1:28am) emissions for power generation of 0.274 mT/MWh (it's 1/3rd of this during the day), this yields 15ug/request. Where do the remaining 5 orders of magnitude come from? What am I missing? If TCO/production energy of the server was included, that couldn't more than double it (capex in a datacenter < opex, and if 100% of the server cost was for energy, we could double, but this is wildly conservative)
- barbegal 6y agoHere is the methodology https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does-future-planet-count-carbon https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does... I think most of it comes from your client device. Your laptop may be using 50W of power or about 20g of CO2 per hour so reading the article for 6 minutes is ~2g of CO2.
- wiz21c 6y agoJust watching a movie about CO2 emissions is order of magnitudes above.
- manveru 6y agoI recently saw another site that tries to offset its carbon footprint: https://mynoise.net/carbonFootprintCompensation.php https://mynoise.net/carbonFootprintCompensation.php I hope this becomes more prevalent at least for paid services.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoNot the whole story. The link provides more details (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does-future-planet-count-carbon https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does...) It involves counting carbon from journalists' travel etc. So a full tally (which is good but isn't just about literal pages loaded) I also wonder how much JS + adverts have to offer as part of that carbon load.
- perfunctory 6y agoWhy on earth would it finally push companies to do anything? Where is the profit motive in this? I am not against lighter websites. But it's not gonna happen unless we start pricing carbon.
- maelito 6y agoWe need an open source model for estimating the CO2 emissions of a server, of the network (including CDNs, etc.), of a device.
- reportgunner 6y agoI was also disappointed with the amount of text compared to the amount of information in the article. It seemed like every paragraph started with for sure you have been in the waves so you know they are waves
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoAgreed, far too much waffle. The first three paragraphs don't even mention the new ship design.
- jonshariat 6y agoI remember writing a paper in college about what the environmental impact of a web page was. One of the biggest energy savings Identified by far was changing the color of your website to use dark backgrounds.