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Environmentally, a lot of this in the digital realm is just greenwashing, where they buy CO2 offsets of debatable usefulness (a whole different discussion). And

Environmentally, a lot of this in the digital realm is just greenwashing, where they buy CO2 offsets of debatable usefulness (a whole different discussion). And moving things from the cloud to on-premise is likely to be climate negative, depending on where you want to draw the particular boundaries (like is it some secondhand server sitting in an office that's already being cooled for regular use anyway? do we exclude that from an analysis?). Here's one sample lifecycle analysis from a Stanford test: https://sustainable.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj26701/files/media/file/life_cycle_analysis_of_cloud_computing_vs._onsite_servers_-_full_report.pdf https://sustainable.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj26701/f... Patagonia is pretty legit (especially once they became a nonprofit, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62906853 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62906853) (edit: on the environmental side, I mean. Labor-wise, they're still not great. See sibling comments discussing this), but I'd say they're the exception more than the norm. B-corps are a good starting point (see mtmail's comment), but even then they should still be individually evaluated. On the labor side, tech co-ops are a (small) movement: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://github.com/hng/tech-coops In general tech companies are too capitalist/VC-driven to be truly concerned about labor matters. And devs are so highly paid compared to most fields of work that there's not a strong drive towards collective organizing and unionization, but that's slowly changing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_sector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto... (Kickstarter, Activision, Alphabet, etc.) For physical products, there are certifications like USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified, FSC (for wood/paper products), but none of those are as powerful as their proponents would like them to be. They're still generally better than nothing, but depending on what you're trying to optimize for, you can find flaws in each of them. In general I would say well-intentioned efforts at ethical sourcing and manufacturing cannot overcome the drastic differences in labor and costs of living between countries; for you to be able to buy a can of coffee at $10 with organic, fair trade, shade grown etc. certifications, that means something has to give. That usually means some farmer is growing and harvesting them for pennies a day. Fair trade pays more than non-fair trade, but it's still not much. Direct Trade is an attempt to improve that further (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_trade), but AFAIK there's not a third-party certification for it, so you're pretty much taking companies at their word. There is rarely transparency about just how much different parts of the supply chain are getting paid, and how each part of the chain handles their environmental practices. It's a tragedy of globalized capitalism -- and arguably its backbone, cheaper sourcing == higher profits -- so inherently at odds. I suppose you can get entirely US-grown-and-roasted coffee (Hawaii?) but there's not much transparency in the labor chain there either, i.e. are they just importing ag labor below a livable wage. There are small tech orgs actually dedicated to on-the-ground local sustainability, like https://www.appropedia.org https://www.appropedia.org or https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/. These are pretty legit but tiny in scale. If you ever really want to evaluate the whole supply chain of something, there is an ISO standard for "lifecycle analysis" https://www.iso.org/standard/37456.html https://www.iso.org/standard/37456.html and you can usually find reports on Google Scholar for whatever product/service you're curious about. It usually won't be pretty, and the answer almost always boils down to "we don't have enough data about how country X makes thing Y, and how much of what they report is truthful vs greenwashing, so we're going to assume Z"... but it's a starting place. ----------- The above are my opinions as a web dev primarily working in renewables, with an undergrad in Environmental Science. I'm not an expert (in anything), just sharing my thoughts.

solardev 3y ago
Opinion only: I might go a step further and argue that, as a whole, "green capitalism" is primarily successful at guilt reduction, not sustainability. The math behind most of these efforts, climatically or socially, just doesn't work out. Consumers demand cheap shit, which almost always means automation + exploitation. The overwhelming majority of these efforts don't really amount to meaningful changes: they've been around for decades and the climate isn't getting any better, the wealth gaps (between and within countries) are usually getting worse, etc. You might be able to subsidize some local efforts here and there, like a small hand-farmed CSA who pay all their willing employees a living wage and sells produce at a drastic markup. That might have better labor practices (though farming is no easy task; it's back-breaking work), but there's no guarantee of that either. Even then there's often exploitation (of idealistic WOOFers, for example). And there is often a lot of CO2 from food spoilage of fresh foods, which can sometimes be worse than refrigeration of frozen foods. There's just no guarantee of anything, really, unless you do a really deep dive into whatever effort you're interested in. Counterproductively, I think many of these efforts and labels actually hurt the movements by providing consumers too easy of a way out. "Oh, I'll just buy organic/fair trade/whatever" and then they stop thinking about the problem altogether, believing that they've done their part and that the problem is solved, when in reality almost nothing has changed, systematically. It reduces our cognitive dissonance around market-driven capitalism vs sustainability and labor practices, but improves almost nothing in the real world. It's all a bit depressing, and I don't think we'll find anything actually-sustainable under current models of capitalism. The whole point of our system is to concentrate profits in the hands of a few at the expense of the many -- whether the "many" is people, animals, places, whatever. Want actual sustainability? We need much, much bigger socioeconomic changes.

solardev 3y ago

Opinion only: I might go a step further and argue that, as a whole, "green capitalism" is primarily successful at guilt reduction, not sustainability. The math behind most of these efforts, climatically or socially, just doesn't work out. Consumers demand cheap shit, which almost always means automation + exploitation. The overwhelming majority of these efforts don't really amount to meaningful changes: they've been around for decades and the climate isn't getting any better, the wealth gaps (between and within countries) are usually getting worse, etc. You might be able to subsidize some local efforts here and there, like a small hand-farmed CSA who pay all their willing employees a living wage and sells produce at a drastic markup. That might have better labor practices (though farming is no easy task; it's back-breaking work), but there's no guarantee of that either. Even then there's often exploitation (of idealistic WOOFers, for example). And there is often a lot of CO2 from food spoilage of fresh foods, which can sometimes be worse than refrigeration of frozen foods. There's just no guarantee of anything, really, unless you do a really deep dive into whatever effort you're interested in. Counterproductively, I think many of these efforts and labels actually hurt the movements by providing consumers too easy of a way out. "Oh, I'll just buy organic/fair trade/whatever" and then they stop thinking about the problem altogether, believing that they've done their part and that the problem is solved, when in reality almost nothing has changed, systematically. It reduces our cognitive dissonance around market-driven capitalism vs sustainability and labor practices, but improves almost nothing in the real world. It's all a bit depressing, and I don't think we'll find anything actually-sustainable under current models of capitalism. The whole point of our system is to concentrate profits in the hands of a few at the expense of the many -- whether the "many" is people, animals, places, whatever. Want actual sustainability? We need much, much bigger socioeconomic changes.