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Comment by barbegal | Hacker News Reader

Here is the methodology https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does...

I think most of it comes from your client device. Your laptop may be using 50W of power or about 20g of CO2 per hour so reading the article for 6 minutes is ~2g of CO2.

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That makes quite a lot of sense, but it also makes me frown a bit at the phrasing, which I feel is quite misleading.

"The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view."

Re-reading it, technically they are right, if "view" is taken in a non-technical fashion. But everyone reading that text would assume if they click refresh, the emissions are doubled.

Also, I do wonder if they take into account bounced users - I would not be surprised if most people only spent 5 or so seconds on the page before moving on.

Also why not add sustinance cost for the human looking at the device then? Food, water, heating/cooling, clothes, glasses, etc...

Proportionally for 2 minutes of course.

Those costs would be the same if the article was read from a newspaper or magazine, so they can be factored out.

My desktop is on whether I'm reading the article or not so those costs can be factored out too.

Surely "view" should also include the human doing the viewing? :P

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24068986, that's 1g every 90s, so 4g CO2 for 6 minutes reading time.

In case someone wants to do the math again :

50W for 1 hour : 50Wh or 0.050kWh

California : 187gCO₂eq/kWh according to https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO

-> 9.35gCO₂eq/h -> 0.16g/min -> 0.935g for 6 minutes

I'd probably use closer to 10W as the device power level (a standard laptop, what I'm using right now), so the number for me would get close to 0.2g, but your point stands; the article is answering a different question than I was assuming, but regardless it seems that the majority of the energy is clearly the local device.

Isn't a modern laptop mostly idle after loading the page (< 5 seconds) ?

There would be a peak for the first seconds, then less than 10W for the rest of the reading time ?

Definitely the peak would be higher. My laptop has a ~60Wh battery and gets ~6hours of battery life, so I was just assuming 10W average for web browsing.

Thanks for the figures. I've bought an ARM PC in part for lowering its footprint.

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