If you care about your website’s CO₂ emissions, but still eat meat, you have been greenwashed.
Datacenters already are one of the greenest industries (electricity-wise) and rapidly improving. AWS and Azure will be carbon neutral by 2025. GCP has been neutral for 6 years and will be carbon-free by 2030.
@Jeremiah This isn't a good take I think. Even while cloud centers are rapidly using more and more green power (some more rapidly than others), a large percentage of cloud emissions (60%+) are from embodied emissions, aka the production of the hardware. Green electricity doesn't mean no emissions for cloud, and green electricity could be used elsewhere if websites were lighter.
Now is it the most high impact thing you can do? Maybe not, but saying you don't have to do anything isn't true.
@geewee My point is that you will reduce your emissions more from eating one less hamburger than saving a few kilobytes on a webpage. There are many great reasons to reduce webpage size but it’s just not a meaningful carbon reduction even if everyone did it.
@geewee From my experience working on cloud infrastructure at companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars annually with AWS/GCP, the big waste is in "cold" data storage and offline data processing. I suspect most companies could reduce their datacenter-related carbon emissions more by deleting data they don't need, reducing data storage resiliency, and optimizing data processing jobs than by reducing their JS payloads. Even then, flying less and vegan cafeterias will be more impactful.
@Jeremiah
That means that one GB of network traffic in power usage is about 0.01888 kg CO2e - if we consider that only 50% of the CO2e comes from the electricity, and the other from embodied emissions we get 0.03776 kg CO2e per GB.
Let's also account for CPU usage parsing the extra stuff on both ends - let's just double the estimate and call it a day: 0.07552 kg Co2e per GB.
@Jeremiah So unless you're running some real huge websites(does happen), or websites with a great deal of users(also happens), I agree that it's probably not the best use of your time from a climate perspective (but might still be from a UX one)
tl;dr - you're probably right for 95% of usecases, unless your pages are really goddamn heavy, or you're serving many millions of daily views.
Add comment