4 ms·

I think a lot of these claims can make sense on paper, but often don't really add up to meaningful impact if actually implemented. Hypothetically, turning off y

I think a lot of these claims can make sense on paper, but often don't really add up to meaningful impact if actually implemented. Hypothetically, turning off your webcam reduces overall network traffic and would reduce the resources required to deliver adequate connection speeds. But in reality, modest reductions in internet traffic won't impact the datacenters and network infrastructures that have already been built. A more likely outcome is that network traffic is used for other applications. Similar situations exist when pointing to the environmental impact of meat production, for example. Not consuming meat would reduce transportation of feed, and transportation accounts for almost all of the carbon emissions from meat production. But that only actually reduces emissions if we assume that the total amount of transportation would go down, rather than the same transportation capacity being used for other goods.

orev 6y ago
It doesn’t get into the details of what “processing” means, but I suspect the processing of the video data itself adds significantly to the overhead. Cameras may (probably) don’t have hardware video encoders for the best codecs, so the processing on the CPU would use quite a bit of power. And on the servers, depending on what you’re doing, there’s a lot of mixing and reprocessing that may need to be done on the streams. My own laptop isn’t that old, and the fan spins up often enough on calls that you know the CPU is chugging more than usual.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Video conferencing is real time. You don't have the latency budget to do really intensive CPU based encoding (although ibviously there is still encoding). Hardware acceleration for video encoding is also quite common in many consumer products.
Tarsul 6y ago
The assumption that freed capacity would be gobbled up by other consumption (100% of it) is a strong one that I wouldn't agree on. Reducing consumption (e.g. internet, meat) means that less would be produced in the long run, thus it does have a positive impact on the climate. We can talk about details or exceptions but the general idea that less consumption = less consumption [sic] = less climate warming is firm. I think the greater point is that we have to look at a long time horizon with long lasting changes to really see this, that's why we as humans have trouble implementing these changes.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  I think it’s easily to correlate internet speed availability to road breadth. Increasing the number of lanes on a road does not reduce traffic, it adds more cars. It’s a common, unfortunate phenomenon.
  - supertrope 6y ago
    Cars, roads, and parking have bumped up against hard limits. There's no way to expand a lane of traffic to more than 2000 cars per hour and people generally resist multipliers like buses and subways unless driving is already painful. Broadband has expanded several orders of magnitude. There's still the ransition from copper to fiber, from 1G to 10G, and multiple wavelengths.
    - t-writescode 6y ago
      But we always fill it up to maximum we can. Higher throughput means more ads and larger images, for example. The more that can be fit in that 250ms or whatever it is, the more that will be fit into it.
goatinaboat 6y ago
But in reality, modest reductions in internet traffic won't impact the datacenters and network infrastructures that have already been built. It’s easy to measure. Camera and incoming video on is about 30 watts more power consumption on my Mac. I can see this on the LCD on the UPS. It’s not just about the datacentre.
- xuhu 6y ago
  Sounds like a performance issue that Zoom/RingCentral need to fix. My laptop takes off even with my camera off, when there are others with their camera on. Meanwhile VLC can play x264 movies without the fan running.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Video encoding and video decoding are apples and oranges.
_Microft 6y ago
> transportation accounts for almost all of the carbon emissions from meat production. Not at all. Transportation accounts for only a tiny fraction of the emissions from the meat production supply chain. The type of food matters much more for total emissions (equivalent) than transportation too: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/02/Environmental-impact-of-food-by-life-cycle-stage.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/02/Environmental-imp... Here is the article that this graph is taken from: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
- manfredo 6y ago
  First of all, a large portion of that graph refers to methane not carbon dioxide. Methane has a half life of 10 years, as compared to carbon dioxide's thousands or tens of thousands. Also take care to inspect, carefully, what these figures represent. This graph only counts transportation of final food product to stores under the "transportation" category: "Emissions from energy use in the transport of food items". In other words, the emissions from taking the packets of meat from a slaughterhouse to grocery store shelves. Not shipping loads of grain to ranches. The actual article [1] this image comes from explains this more clearly, "Food transport accounted for only 5% of this. This means that if we were to take the case where we assume a household sources all of their food locally, the maximum reduction in their footprint would be 5%". Transportation of feed to ranches is categorized under feed, not transportation. This is why estimates for the amount of carbon emissions meat is responsible often vary by a large margin. Some place meat, alone, as responsible for 14-19% of emissions. Others place all food production (not just meat) as under 5%. It largely depends on whether you include things like transportation, nitrogen fixing via the haber process, and land conversion under the umbrella of food production or in their own separate categories. 1. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
  - smokey_circles 6y ago
    I disagree, going so far as to call this intentionally obtuse or misinformed. 1. CO2 is not the sole measure of environmental impact. The land usage problem is also pretty serious. Deforestation chief among it. 2. I can't find any literature to back up the claim that CO2 has an atmospheric residency of thousands of years, seems to be 100 at best estimates [0] 3. Over that 100 year period, Methane has 25x greater effect than CO2 [1] 4. Methane oxidises into CO2 and H20, so transport is still not the greatest contributor [0] https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=1605&context=earthsci_facpub https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&ar... [1] https://unece.org/challenge https://unece.org/challenge
Aerroon 6y ago
>Not consuming meat would reduce transportation of feed Not consuming meat would also reduce its price. This would enable people who couldn't eat as much meat before to eat more meat. It might have a smaller impact on developed nations, but likely a larger one in developing nations.

orev 6y ago

It doesn’t get into the details of what “processing” means, but I suspect the processing of the video data itself adds significantly to the overhead. Cameras may (probably) don’t have hardware video encoders for the best codecs, so the processing on the CPU would use quite a bit of power. And on the servers, depending on what you’re doing, there’s a lot of mixing and reprocessing that may need to be done on the streams. My own laptop isn’t that old, and the fan spins up often enough on calls that you know the CPU is chugging more than usual.

bawolff 6y ago
Video conferencing is real time. You don't have the latency budget to do really intensive CPU based encoding (although ibviously there is still encoding). Hardware acceleration for video encoding is also quite common in many consumer products.

Tarsul 6y ago

The assumption that freed capacity would be gobbled up by other consumption (100% of it) is a strong one that I wouldn't agree on. Reducing consumption (e.g. internet, meat) means that less would be produced in the long run, thus it does have a positive impact on the climate. We can talk about details or exceptions but the general idea that less consumption = less consumption [sic] = less climate warming is firm. I think the greater point is that we have to look at a long time horizon with long lasting changes to really see this, that's why we as humans have trouble implementing these changes.

t-writescode 6y ago
I think it’s easily to correlate internet speed availability to road breadth. Increasing the number of lanes on a road does not reduce traffic, it adds more cars. It’s a common, unfortunate phenomenon.
- supertrope 6y ago
  Cars, roads, and parking have bumped up against hard limits. There's no way to expand a lane of traffic to more than 2000 cars per hour and people generally resist multipliers like buses and subways unless driving is already painful. Broadband has expanded several orders of magnitude. There's still the ransition from copper to fiber, from 1G to 10G, and multiple wavelengths.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    But we always fill it up to maximum we can. Higher throughput means more ads and larger images, for example. The more that can be fit in that 250ms or whatever it is, the more that will be fit into it.

goatinaboat 6y ago

But in reality, modest reductions in internet traffic won't impact the datacenters and network infrastructures that have already been built. It’s easy to measure. Camera and incoming video on is about 30 watts more power consumption on my Mac. I can see this on the LCD on the UPS. It’s not just about the datacentre.

xuhu 6y ago
Sounds like a performance issue that Zoom/RingCentral need to fix. My laptop takes off even with my camera off, when there are others with their camera on. Meanwhile VLC can play x264 movies without the fan running.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Video encoding and video decoding are apples and oranges.

_Microft 6y ago

> transportation accounts for almost all of the carbon emissions from meat production. Not at all. Transportation accounts for only a tiny fraction of the emissions from the meat production supply chain. The type of food matters much more for total emissions (equivalent) than transportation too: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/02/Environmental-impact-of-food-by-life-cycle-stage.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/02/Environmental-imp... Here is the article that this graph is taken from: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

manfredo 6y ago
First of all, a large portion of that graph refers to methane not carbon dioxide. Methane has a half life of 10 years, as compared to carbon dioxide's thousands or tens of thousands. Also take care to inspect, carefully, what these figures represent. This graph only counts transportation of final food product to stores under the "transportation" category: "Emissions from energy use in the transport of food items". In other words, the emissions from taking the packets of meat from a slaughterhouse to grocery store shelves. Not shipping loads of grain to ranches. The actual article [1] this image comes from explains this more clearly, "Food transport accounted for only 5% of this. This means that if we were to take the case where we assume a household sources all of their food locally, the maximum reduction in their footprint would be 5%". Transportation of feed to ranches is categorized under feed, not transportation. This is why estimates for the amount of carbon emissions meat is responsible often vary by a large margin. Some place meat, alone, as responsible for 14-19% of emissions. Others place all food production (not just meat) as under 5%. It largely depends on whether you include things like transportation, nitrogen fixing via the haber process, and land conversion under the umbrella of food production or in their own separate categories. 1. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
- smokey_circles 6y ago
  I disagree, going so far as to call this intentionally obtuse or misinformed. 1. CO2 is not the sole measure of environmental impact. The land usage problem is also pretty serious. Deforestation chief among it. 2. I can't find any literature to back up the claim that CO2 has an atmospheric residency of thousands of years, seems to be 100 at best estimates [0] 3. Over that 100 year period, Methane has 25x greater effect than CO2 [1] 4. Methane oxidises into CO2 and H20, so transport is still not the greatest contributor [0] https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=1605&context=earthsci_facpub https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&ar... [1] https://unece.org/challenge https://unece.org/challenge

Aerroon 6y ago

>Not consuming meat would reduce transportation of feed Not consuming meat would also reduce its price. This would enable people who couldn't eat as much meat before to eat more meat. It might have a smaller impact on developed nations, but likely a larger one in developing nations.