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Why I Canceled My CO2stats Account
- rokhayakebe 18y agoIt would have been best for CO2Stats to help Google to buy carbon offset and further work with them to reduce their energy consumption etc.... But I guess not every company cares what Google thinks off them and they just spit it like it is.
- redorb 18y agospitting it how it is would be here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-searc... the conflict of interest is the irritating part.
- axod 18y agoUmm I think google is doing fine with renewable energy initiatives by itself actually... Real ones - like installing solar panels all over the roof. Instead of imaginary "buy carbon offset" ones.
- rokhayakebe 18y agoI do not know what Google does in regards to green energy. I am simply saying that if I were Co2Stats I would have try to work with them.
- axod 18y agoFrom the google blog: "We've made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use. In 2008 our philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested $45 million in breakthrough clean energy technologies. And last summer, as part of our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative (RE<C), we created an internal engineering group dedicated to exploring clean energy. We're also working with other members of the IT community to improve efficiency on a broader scale. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a group which champions more efficient computing. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That's a lot of kettles of tea." Also they have a few solar panels http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=google&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.808514,76.640625&ie=UTF8&ll=37.422002,-122.084321&spn=0.00213,0.004678&t=h&z=18&iwloc=F http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
- pg 18y agoCO2Stats doesn't buy carbon offsets. They buy renewable energy certificates.
- axod 18y agoIt just seems weird to me... 1. I could install solar panels, wind turbines, optimize things, require less servers, energy saving lights etc, reduce my energy bill, and save money. 2. I could pay CO2Stats money, to buy renewable energy certificates, costing me extra money, and not reducing energy usage. Why would I choose 2 over 1? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
- gravitycop 18y agoI could install solar panels, wind turbines [...] and save money. How do solar panels and wind turbines save money?
- axod 18y agoI'm confused. If you install solar panels, which generate electricity, surely you don't need to spend so much buying electricity?
- gravitycop 18y agoIf you install solar panels [...] you don't need to spend so much buying electricity Does it cost nothing to install solar panels?
- anamax 18y agoSolar panels (and windmills) aren't the cheapest way to generate electricity. While they have 0 fuel costs, they have both maintenance and fixed costs. And then there's that whole "night" and "no wind" thing.
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- tsbardella 18y agoIt is snake oil
- rrival 18y agoSomehow no one mentioned what I've run into a lot with green initiatives: they're treated like public goods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good). i.e. "It's nice to know that someone else can solve that problem so easily and I benefit directly regardless."
- newt0311 18y agoCost-benifit analysis: If the green lobby knew the meaning of this phrase, they would realize how ludicrous 90+% of their proposals sound.
- harpastum 18y agocost-benefit analysis: If anti-slavery lawyers knew the meaning of this phrase, they would realize how ludicrous 90+% of their proposals sound. I'm not saying that buying eco-credits is anywhere near as important as stemming slavery, I'm just saying cost-benefit analysis ignores all qualitative benefits--e.g. clearer skies, lower overall pollution, freedom, etc. Cost benefit should be considered, but it shouldn't be used to write off major concerns.
- mseebach 18y agoThe cost/benefit analysis for slavery changed because the coefficients for several variables on the slave-side changed away from 0. The green lobby often measures cost in "oh, we're so rich and privileged anyway and any amount of emissions that's less than before is worth it"... I.e. unrealistic coefficients. We're simply not at the point where a few grams of CO2 here and there is death or survival in 2050. In reality, society is interested in solutions with the highest reduced emissions pr. cost-unit, but the green lobby don't seem to be too interested in giving those out.
- DaniFong 18y agoIf we acted as if the stupid elements of the conservative/earth plundering lobby spoke for all of them, they'd look stupid too. There's no single opinion on the best solutions going forward.
- run4yourlives 18y agoYour comparison to slavery is completely retarded, both because is a vast overstatement, but more so because it doesn't even make sense. If you rtfa, you'd see that the cost benefit analysis is one of the stronger points: How many trips were avoided, how many packages not mailed and how many phone calls not made because of the internet? Trying to measure one's carbon footprint, and then lessen that footprint is noble. Profiting through some obscure calculation that includes some things but not others is opportunism.
- vaksel 18y agoThe whole green thing for websites just seems extremely stupid to me. Its like being penny wise, but pound foolish. A single Semi probably affects the environment more than most websites(except behemoths with hundreds of thousands of server farms)
- emmett 18y agoIf you run the math, you'll realize that's not even close to true.
- mixmax 18y agohave you run the math? It would be interesting to see some numbers.
- SwellJoe 18y agohttp://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867 According to this article, the IT industry matched the aviation industry for global CO2 emissions in 2007. A regular ol' desktop PC, with regular daily usage (9 to 5), uses about 400kwh of power per year. Servers, being larger/louder/faster than the average PC, and running 24/7, are obviously dramatically more consumptive. Does that mean there aren't bigger problems that need solving? No, of course not. Automobiles are a huge source of problems and need to be dealt with. But, like CFLs, small changes to high quantities can make a real difference. If we wanted to be in denial, or assume that only the biggest producers of waste need to change, then one could just write off the carbon footprint of your PC and servers as unimportant. I don't know enough about carbon offsets and such to know what the right thing is here, but I think it's a novel approach to a real problem. Companies with large data centers really are burning a lot of coal and pumping a lot of crap into the air. Sure, their employees are doing even worse on the drive to work...but people need to work on all of those problems, not just the most obvious. And, of course...before I judge someone who is working on the smaller problem of server carbon footprint, I would have to ask myself what I'm doing that's more useful.
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- shuleatt 18y agoGreat points by Altgate. I have been wondering why no one mentions the opportunity costs associated with the Internet vs. its alternatives. Information and products need to get delivered...the web seems pretty darn good to me as a green solution
- SwellJoe 18y agoI have been wondering why no one mentions the opportunity costs associated with the Internet vs. its alternatives. Isn't it irrelevant in this context? No one is saying, "Computers are bad for the environment...so go get in your car and drive everywhere for everything!" The point of this service is to reduce the carbon footprint of Internet services. We, as an industry, do use power (quite a bit of it), and we do produce waste, so if someone wants to alleviate that by buying carbon credits, for marketing or ethical reasons, it has no relation to opportunity costs of the Internet vs. alternatives. I don't know the answers to these problems, but it doesn't make sense to blame CO2Stats for not solving problems that they haven't set out to solve.
- emmett 18y agoWhile it would be interesting to compare online access to offline access, CO2stats is providing a service that could really change things moving forward. You can't buy carbon credits from Blockbuster for the total cost of shopping there; CO2stats makes it possible to move towards a completely carbon neutral world. Obviously they have a long way to go...sites like Animoto use much more CO2 per user than Craigslist, and that's very hard to account for in a general way. But to complain that they don't give you credit for how bad the offline version would be is unfair.
- axod 18y ago"CO2stats makes it possible to move towards a completely carbon neutral world." Given the fact that there's no consensus yet as to the benefits of a carbon neutral world, don't you think this is premature? Throwing money into a pit that might change something someday... assuming it needs changing in the first place.
- run4yourlives 18y agoGenerally, a carbon neutral world would be a benefit, regardless of the effects on climate change. We'd ensure the sustainable operation of the planet - regardless of how many of us there are - because we'd be maintaining the earth's resources in their current balance. Right now, we're converting a good chuck of them from one form to another, which eventually - even if this isn't true now - will have some sort of repercussions. That being said, being completely carbon neutral is pretty much impossible given the way our world is currently set up.
- benzim 18y agoWhy would this necessarily be a benefit? This same argument could have been made at any time in history. For millennia humanity has benefited from converting resources from one form to another. What has changed? Trying to be carbon neutral would have the obvious drawback of significantly slowing economic growth. Is there a benefit to being carbon neutral that outweighs this cost?
- DaniFong 18y agoLast I checked CO2Stats was very careful about explaining what they counted. What I took away from their website is that if you have an account for them you're paying for your visitor's computer power, and the slice of network in between. That was most interesting, for me. I'm sorry the OP was under the wrong impression.
- invisible 18y agoThe first two points are exactly what I said 4 hours earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430505 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430505 "The doctor's report accounts for a) your computer viewing the page for X minutes, b) the overall searches per power used by google's datacenters, and c) some other random guessing I'm assuming."
- ivankirigin 18y agoEven if you don't believe in climate change, I really like that CO2stats is a distributed opt-in approach. Instead of government mandates, you have individuals and companies taking action. Other comments about cost-benefit analysis also miss the point to a certain degree. Raising awareness is valuable. Feeling good is valuable. That doesn't enter into an individual's cost benefit analysis, but it really matters. The main critique of I have of CO2stats is that I'd like to see options besides buying energy. I'd like to donate to research into alternative energy, not directly buying current tech. Donating to research also highlights that there are good options to choose regardless of whether climate change is real.
- pg 18y agoThis is egregious linkbait. The author acts as if Alex wrote the Times article. If he had, he would have disclosed that he was a founder of CO2Stats. But he didn't write the article; he was just quoted in it. Anyone who's been quoted in an article knows how little control you have in that situation. More often than not the reporter has some agenda and all he wants is quotes to suit it. So it is here: I happened to see Alex immediately after he talked to the Times reporter, and he was frustrated then that the reporter hadn't wanted to hear about anything except the carbon emissions caused by Google searches. Which, in typical reporter fashion, he then proceeded to present in the most simplistic and controversial way. The author of the present article has done the same thing in the opposite direction, replying to linkbait with linkbait. If he'd really wanted to see what Alex had to say about these issues, he could have looked on CO2Stats' site.
- illumen 18y agoFull disclosure: pg(through ycombinator) is an investor in CO2Stats.
- pg 18y agoI assumed anyone who read News.YC would know that, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276229 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276229 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281157 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281157 but there have been so many new users lately that I suppose there might be some who didn't realize it. I'm not sure what the convention should be about identifying YC alumni in link titles. Putting (YC S08) after company names is awkward and only intermittently done. I've considered displaying them in a slightly different color instead. If anyone has other suggestions, let me know.
- gravitycop 18y agoPutting (YC S08) after company names is awkward and only intermittently done. If part of the problem is labor-intensiveness, I would suggest automating, or semi-automating (where a suspected YC-funded name gets auto-flagged for tag-approval), the tagging process. (Alternate name spellings could be added continuously over time to the auto-flag-list.) This might achieve uniform display with minimal labor expense. I agree that a different color could reduce the display awkwardness (though I often wonder in such cases if colorblind users will miss the information).
- patrickg-zill 18y agoInteresting to note that they buy credits at $5/ton then sell them at $200/ton. That means that your $10/month account is really only 50 cents worth of offsets, plus $9.50 worth of guilt. The medieval popes are envious...
- ntoshev 18y agoWhere do you get these numbers from?
- fnazeeri 18y agoYou can find prices for carbon credits (US) on CCX here http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/market/data/summary.jsf http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/market/data/summary.jsf (currently trades around $2 per metric ton). CO2 stats is buying wind energy credits which are different than CFI traded on CCX so they could be paying a different price, but it's unlikely to be materially different (because CFI is basically a listed version of wind credits, bio fuels, land fill gas to energy, etc.). So if they have enough volume, this is the price CO2stats should be able to buy offsets. In terms of the price at which they sell, it varies on a per ton basis because of their fixed monthly fee structure. http://www.co2stats.com/signup.php http://www.co2stats.com/signup.php $10 per month gets you 100K page views. Based on the stats from my blog, CO2stats equates 100K page views to approximately 500 kilos of CO2. So the cheapest they sell at is $20 per ton but the reality is that it is much higher because most clients wouldn't have 100K page views. For example, if your site gets 10K page views, then you'd be looking at $200 per ton.