This Website Is Killing the Planet | Hacker News Reader

This Website Is Killing the Planet

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> it emits the amount of carbon that 4 trees absorb in a year

This reminds me of the last election in the UK. Each party was vying for who could plant the most trees as a green policy. It's admirable but I think most people, myself included, don't appreciate how little each tree absorbs and how long it takes to have an impact.

Yes, to have any effect, it seems sensible to enact both carbon-reduction and tree-planting strategies to balance out one's overall impact over time.

Absolutely, I realise my original reply could be construed as being negative toward tree planting. I'm not. It is one part of a big strategy.

This article is really good to see and highlights an issue with tech that needs more attention.

This is an important matter. Thank you for bringing this up!

For my wordsandbuttons.online , I have one rule - all the pages, no matter how interactive-rich, should take less than 64KB each. To get there, I write all my HTML, JS and CSS by hand. Should confess, I wasn't thinking much of the environment, it was mostly about user experience. But I'm happy that it pays of in this way too.

My average page produces 0.02 g of CO2, which sums up to a 1% of sumo wrestler over the year (or a full-sized sumo wrestler over a century), and it can be absorbed by only one tree (what a coincidence, I have my tree planted just last month).

So, who wants to turn it into a competition?

This is probably the most feature rich page, and it's still just 355 cups of tea a year. https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/wordsandbuttons-online...

This is fun!

Nice! Did you plant the tree yourself or use a service?

A service. It was a gift.

I did plant a few trees myself but these were fruit trees and several years back.

Compared to http://info.cern.ch, you are still a rather heavyweight polluter ;) https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/info-cern-ch

That's so cool!

my shitty ass blog uses as much energy as it would take to send a tesla from sydney to canberra and back. That's honestly somewhat whelming.

How do I go from emiting 0.40g of CO2 to 0.02... ?

Edit:

Hah my twitter page emits more carbon than my blog.

https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/blog-chewxy-com/ vs https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/twitter-com-chewxy/

I find that rather funny

Run a web page performance test and see where the bulk of your page weight is. Usually it’s images and JavaScript. Then try to reduce those sizes and you’ll see some improvements.

>my shitty ass blog uses as much energy as it would take to send a tesla from sydney to canberra and back

Does it cost as much? If not, why do you think that is?

Great points but still how does the web compare to las Vegas running 24/7 or offices in the city leaving their lights on all night?

According to Website Carbon Calculator:

> The internet consumes a lot of electricity. 416.2TWh per year to be precise. To give you some perspective, that’s more than the entire United Kingdom.

I'm not sure if that is the infrastructure of the internet plus the data-weight of the web...

I wonder what their carbon badges add to a site's footprint. Seems a bit counterproductive.

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