Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowfaxRodeo | Hacker News Reader

The internet causes around 5% of global carbon emmissions.

It's invisible, and difficult to measure, so little gets done about it. But if you're a developer who wants to help. Check out:

https://sustainablewebdesign.org/

Pretty much all the solutions to making a greener web would make the web better in general.

- Send less data (efficient video, images, fonts, etc) - Make fewer requests - Use a CDN (the greenest one you can) - Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data - Better bot blocking - Use PWAs when appropriate

- Change the culture, foster competition for doing the above.

I'm sure there's a thousand more items you could add to the list.

View on HN

Where's that internet @ 5% of global emissions number from? It sounds suspiciously high. Networking is not that energy intensive compared to stuff that goes on in data centers and end user devices. Mobile network base stations are pretty power hungry though.

edit: there's a near 5% number in here, but it's not about internet or global emissions: https://internethealthreport.org/2018/the-internet-uses-more... - was linked from your https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ page. It's a 2017 estimate from Greenpeace about how much energy ICT sector as a whole will use as a percentage of electricity consumption by now. So it didn't predict the 'net would produce 5% of global emissions, it predicted all of global ICT would use 5% of all electricity - a much wider slice of a much smaller pie that also includes a lot of renewables and nuclear.

Something that almost the entire population uses all day is only using 5%? Sounds incredibly efficient. Repacking fonts to be smaller sounds about as useful as plugging a hand crank generator in to the power point.

Solutions to the climate crisis can all be broken down into smaller and smaller parts — small enough to be ignored — or small enough to be easily fixed.

For web developers that 5% is our responsibility, and we have the means to change it in ways many people cannot.

As for fonts — yes I'm sure it would make a big impact. Font files are a decent chunk of average page weight.

You're pretty much guaranteed to make an immeasurably larger impact by spending your time researching and donating to climate charities, action groups, and politicians than you are doing any of the things you listed. Put your effort and money towards things that actually make a difference, not these tiny drops in a vast ocean.

The internet causes much more. It facilitates turning millions of houses to hotels, cheap flights, cheap rides, high speed intercontinental trade and a relentless behavioral treadmill of selfies in exotic backgrounds. The internet is the biggest driver of consumerism and its biggest beneficiary as attested by the exorbitant valuations of related companies

  >*Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data*

This is why I left and denounce green movements. It's always (on an individual activist up to organization level), a front for completely unrelated ideological agendas.

Edit: 'A front' is too strong - a convenient vector. But you poison the well by failing to restrain yourself from slipping that stuff in.

Most of the activists I know are not developers, they don't have tech savvy people in their groups. And as far as I can tell developers will just add a million tracking scripts to anything without much thought.

I don't think this makes green movements fake. it just means that they don't understand security and privacy.

I couldn't even join my local group during lockdown because they only opperate on facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com