5 ms·

I wonder what the CO2 emissions of all these ads are?

by RachelF 3y ago

iamacyborg 3y ago
A lot, given the sheer number of network requests a single ad can spawn
- gruez 3y ago
  "A lot", compared to what? A single household? Probably. As a percentage of overall global electricity consumption? Probably negligible. Some math with conservative estimates: * power consumption of mobile processor: 5W * daily ad use: 1 hour (assume it's 100% cpu for the entire time) * smartphone users: 7.8 billion (world population) Total yearly electricity consumption given the above: 2.8 TWh World electricity consumption: 23,921 TWh in 2019
  - wasmitnetzen 3y ago
    You'd have to include the servers doing the auctions, sentiment analysis, profiling,... into it as well. And then the whole ad industry, every email, every meeting, ... I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >You'd have to include the servers doing the auctions, sentiment analysis, profiling,... into it as well. Feel free to put up an estimate then. >I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste. Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.
      - ploum 3y ago
        You have to include the fact that the very clear objective of advertising is to make you consume more. Thus producing more pollution than if there were no ads. So, even if advertising was technically neutral (which is clearly not the case), it would still be an ecological cataclysm. One would even argue that the whole climate emergency is created by our advertise/consume culture.
        reactordev 3y ago
        careful now, you can't make cents without advertising dollars. (pun)
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        That, plus the industry exists to support a negative-sum game. Past some degree of market or channel or target saturation, the only thing your ad spend does is cancels out the ad spend of your competitors. That, and it fuels the growth of an industry that's happy to enjoy the infinite money printer.
        reactordev 3y ago
        And the services needed to consume said money printer. GCP wouldn’t exist. To be fair, a lot of it runs on AWS so AWS’ business would take a serious hit as well.
      - eru 3y ago
        > I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste. To give a really simple upper limit: 36.8 billion tonnes per year. Because that's the current total global CO2 emissions per year. And we can be pretty sure that ads are less than that, or at least not more. I agree with your assessment of the grandparent comment.
      - _Algernon_ 3y ago
        >Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective. Pulling an "estimate" out of your ass isn't exactly any more objective than admitting that attempting to estimate it is futile. "I know that I know nothing" and all that.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
So many people so concerned about CO2 emissions from computing devices... all the way down to Microsoft setting the default timeout for Bluetooth on Windows 11 to ONE MINUTE. It took me 2 weeks of hair pulling and updating everything before I realized why my mouse and keyboard would stop working, because it NEVER occurred to me in my WILDEST dreams that an OS developer would be given the insane task of creating a timeout like this, and writing a UI to control it. Then I realized that some middle manager in the guts of Microsoft probably got a bonus by being able to tell his management that "Microsoft" was now saving a collective million pennies a year of energy costs by crippling this basic feature. Well done, guys. Where's the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs or carbon footprint per dollar of ad revenue is? It surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. Sure, complain about cryptocurrency "setting the earth on fire," but Google gets a free pass for much the same thing to make their trillions?
- unreal6 3y ago
  Or, for that matter, any incremental call Microsoft is making to any GPT-based model. The power consumption from these inferences are immense, and appearing everywhere in their interfaces.
- unreal6 3y ago
  Or, for that matter, any incremental call Microsoft is making to any GPT-based model. The power consumption from these inferences are immense, and appearing with increased frequency.
- RachelF 3y ago
  True, I wonder how much power the inefficient "Windows Update" uses every month, too. I can hear the fans on my Windows machine spin up, and I know it's Windows Update time.
e2le 3y ago
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/2/18 https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/2/18 Although this study doesn't discuss C02 emissions, it does discuss energy use and the potential impact of internet advertising. Unfortunately, it only discusses the impact on client-side devices, the energy consumption of hardware used to serve advertisements (networking, servers) is left to a future study. >Strikingly, uBlock Origin has the potential to save the average global Internet user more than 100 h annually. >So, for example, the 1.35 × 1010 kWh saved globally for using uBlock Origin is equivalent to more than 1.0% of the electricity generated per year from coal in the United States, which is responsible for the premature deaths of about 52,000 American every year from air pollution [43,44]. >Globally, the results with the most efficient open source ad blocker tested, uBlock Origin, would be even more substantial: ad blocking would save consumers more than $1.8 billion/year.
- titaniumtown 3y ago
  Wow, that is a mind-blowing figure. $1.8 billion/year and 100 h annually. Would've never expected the figure to be that large.

I wonder what the CO2 emissions of all these ads are?

iamacyborg 3y ago

A lot, given the sheer number of network requests a single ad can spawn

gruez 3y ago
"A lot", compared to what? A single household? Probably. As a percentage of overall global electricity consumption? Probably negligible. Some math with conservative estimates: * power consumption of mobile processor: 5W * daily ad use: 1 hour (assume it's 100% cpu for the entire time) * smartphone users: 7.8 billion (world population) Total yearly electricity consumption given the above: 2.8 TWh World electricity consumption: 23,921 TWh in 2019
- wasmitnetzen 3y ago
  You'd have to include the servers doing the auctions, sentiment analysis, profiling,... into it as well. And then the whole ad industry, every email, every meeting, ... I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >You'd have to include the servers doing the auctions, sentiment analysis, profiling,... into it as well. Feel free to put up an estimate then. >I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste. Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.
    - ploum 3y ago
      You have to include the fact that the very clear objective of advertising is to make you consume more. Thus producing more pollution than if there were no ads. So, even if advertising was technically neutral (which is clearly not the case), it would still be an ecological cataclysm. One would even argue that the whole climate emergency is created by our advertise/consume culture.
      - reactordev 3y ago
        careful now, you can't make cents without advertising dollars. (pun)
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        That, plus the industry exists to support a negative-sum game. Past some degree of market or channel or target saturation, the only thing your ad spend does is cancels out the ad spend of your competitors. That, and it fuels the growth of an industry that's happy to enjoy the infinite money printer.
        reactordev 3y ago
        And the services needed to consume said money printer. GCP wouldn’t exist. To be fair, a lot of it runs on AWS so AWS’ business would take a serious hit as well.
    - eru 3y ago
      > I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste. To give a really simple upper limit: 36.8 billion tonnes per year. Because that's the current total global CO2 emissions per year. And we can be pretty sure that ads are less than that, or at least not more. I agree with your assessment of the grandparent comment.
    - _Algernon_ 3y ago
      >Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective. Pulling an "estimate" out of your ass isn't exactly any more objective than admitting that attempting to estimate it is futile. "I know that I know nothing" and all that.

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

So many people so concerned about CO2 emissions from computing devices... all the way down to Microsoft setting the default timeout for Bluetooth on Windows 11 to ONE MINUTE. It took me 2 weeks of hair pulling and updating everything before I realized why my mouse and keyboard would stop working, because it NEVER occurred to me in my WILDEST dreams that an OS developer would be given the insane task of creating a timeout like this, and writing a UI to control it. Then I realized that some middle manager in the guts of Microsoft probably got a bonus by being able to tell his management that "Microsoft" was now saving a collective million pennies a year of energy costs by crippling this basic feature. Well done, guys. Where's the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs or carbon footprint per dollar of ad revenue is? It surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. Sure, complain about cryptocurrency "setting the earth on fire," but Google gets a free pass for much the same thing to make their trillions?

unreal6 3y ago
Or, for that matter, any incremental call Microsoft is making to any GPT-based model. The power consumption from these inferences are immense, and appearing everywhere in their interfaces.
unreal6 3y ago
Or, for that matter, any incremental call Microsoft is making to any GPT-based model. The power consumption from these inferences are immense, and appearing with increased frequency.
RachelF 3y ago
True, I wonder how much power the inefficient "Windows Update" uses every month, too. I can hear the fans on my Windows machine spin up, and I know it's Windows Update time.

e2le 3y ago

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/2/18 https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/2/18 Although this study doesn't discuss C02 emissions, it does discuss energy use and the potential impact of internet advertising. Unfortunately, it only discusses the impact on client-side devices, the energy consumption of hardware used to serve advertisements (networking, servers) is left to a future study. >Strikingly, uBlock Origin has the potential to save the average global Internet user more than 100 h annually. >So, for example, the 1.35 × 1010 kWh saved globally for using uBlock Origin is equivalent to more than 1.0% of the electricity generated per year from coal in the United States, which is responsible for the premature deaths of about 52,000 American every year from air pollution [43,44]. >Globally, the results with the most efficient open source ad blocker tested, uBlock Origin, would be even more substantial: ad blocking would save consumers more than $1.8 billion/year.

titaniumtown 3y ago
Wow, that is a mind-blowing figure. $1.8 billion/year and 100 h annually. Would've never expected the figure to be that large.