5 ms·

“ The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view” I’m a little surprised that the emissions are so high per page view. I

• ilyt 3y ago
  napkin math on https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 0.855 pounds/0.38kg of CO2 per kWh. or 0.38g per Wh so 3.6g would be ~9.4 Wh, let's assume 10Wh Site takes ~700ms to render, . So it would need to consume the equivalent of over 5kW of compute for a second to get that amount of CO2 per view. That assuming it would be 100% load, and not just "waiting on various network RTTs" I think it's safe to assume it's pure bullshit, even including every device along the way
  • Maxion 3y ago
    I don’t think that metric is just the power usage of the servers, it’s more likely that it also includes the other energy costs of the company and its employees, and how much effort went in to working on the article itself.
• penteract 3y ago
  It's including the amount used by your machine while viewing the page, so if you're using a desktop with a 500W PSU (and you're using all 500W, which is probably an overestimate) and you spend a minute reading the article, that's 30kJ, which is roughly 1/2 a gram of methane[1], so roughly a gram of CO2 (more if it's coal, more if you take into account the fact that generators don't capture all the energy as electricity). [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Combustion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Combustion
  • loeg 3y ago
    It's insane to estimate 500W average load for reading a webpage.