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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

> For a website that has 10,000 visitors per month, in one year you could save about 4.5 kilograms of CO2 emissions just by replacing Google analytics with Plausible.

What the hell? How do you calculate this figure? That's roughly equivalent to the CO2 created by driving a gas-burning car 10 feet to the data center to ferry information about each request (figuring a car emits about 1.2 pounds of CO2 per mile traveled). That's an astounding claim, and there's no effort to even explain the idea behind it.

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> 4.5 kilograms of CO2

So, an absolutely negligible amount of CO2?

By virtually any metric? i.e., you, as an individual, exhale that much CO2 in a week.

Hold industrial processes responsible for CO2 emissions, not your website. (Unless you're bitcoin, I guess?)

This kind of penny wise and pound foolish approach just seems like a waste of time at best and at worst it lulls voters into complacency and distracts from the fact that our politicians still aren't doing anywhere close to enough to address carbon emissions. It's just PR and corporate greenwashing.

Like everything else, the best approach is just to use a mix of regulation, renewable subsidies, and a carbon tax to make using fossil fuels cost prohibitive compared to renewables and the market will eliminate them on its own. The wider the cost difference becomes, the faster renewables will displace carbon energy. We're getting there slowly as wind and solar are now slightly cheaper than carbon fuels, but we should definitely be helping it along a lot faster if we're serious about avoiding the worst case climate scenarios.

So far, it seems like we aren't serious about it and our leadership is sleepwalking us towards increasing catastrophe.

It's a point from the plausible.io website and sales pitch.

https://plausible.io/lightweight-web-analytics

The file size savings is 44.3 kB per visitor, which over 120,000 visits is 5 GB per year.

The Website Carbon Calculator uses a ratio of 1.8 kWh per GB of data transferred, and 475 g CO2 generated per kWh.

https://www.websitecarbon.com/

44.3 kB per visit * 120,000 visits per year * 1.8 kWh per GB * 475 g CO2 per kWh = 4.5 kg per year after fixing units.

"These numbers are all estimates but you can imagine if millions of website owners and Google Analytics users end up making a similar reduction in their website size too. The total reduction in the carbon footprint of the web would be immense."

"a ratio of 1.8 kWh per GB of data transferred"

This seems wildly high, even counting all the hops. For reference, 1.8 kWh is enough to move my car 7 miles and my e-bike over 100 miles.

It's difficult to estimate accurately, but their methods are spelled out on the website.

https://www.websitecarbon.com/how-does-it-work/

"Energy intensity of web data

Energy is used at the data centre, telecoms networks and by the end user’s computer or mobile device. Of course, this varies for every website and every visitor and so we use an average figure. The figures used are for 2017 from the report On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030 by Anders Andrae and Tomas Edler, adjusted to remove manufacturing energy as this is not relevant to this calculator. We then divide the total amount of energy used by the total annual data transfer over the web as reported in the Nature article, How to stop data centres gobbling up the world’s electricity. This gives us a figure of 1.8kWh/GB."

If you view the paper [1], I gave it a quick scan and it seems to be counting the electricity usage of all communications devices on top of data centers.

So in power per GB transferred, it's counting all the power used by people's 60" internet-connected TV displays.

Which is, obviously, absurd to include if you're trying to measure the marginal effect of additional data. More data doesn't increase your screen's power consumption, obviously.

An accurate claim for Plausible would have to be based mainly on marginal increases of power by datacenter and communications networks.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/6/1/117/htm

It's hard to say. Obviously without any data at all none of those screens would be on.

I always find the discussion of marginal increases of energy tricky. If I buy a plane ticket on a half-empty flight, obviously that flight was going to take off anyway, so the marginal increase of my weight plus my luggage is fairly negligible in comparison, so I'm only to "blame" for a fraction of the fuel spent, right? But who else is there to blame except the passengers, without whom there would be (eventually) no flights? So shouldn't we all divide the blame evenly?

If we keep it simple, there are two kinds of marginal increases.

The first type is when marginal increase can lead to a "new unit", like planes you refer to -- or servers used by data centers. If a plane fits 100 people, then (simplifying) 1/100 of the time you'll result in a new plane being used, so it makes sense to divide the plane's total resources by passengers -- not just the fuel you used.

But the second type never results in a "new unit". In this scenario, using more resource-hungry analytics will never push someone to purchase a second cell phone to spread the load. So counting anything but marginal energy increase usage by the CPU directly is disingenuous.

So in the case of analytics software, their data center server/power resources fall into the first type. But the consumer device resources fall into the second type.

So in this case I don't think there's anything tricky at all about it.

Someone wants to be paid for that energy dissipated. I don't see how Netflix could be profitable this way.

What if you are switching from a datacenter that's carbon neutral to one that isn't?

Also as a note, the google analytics js is heavily cached and thus doesn't have to travel as far or at all. Also Google has onramps to their carbon neutral infrastructure everywhere, so theres also that.

> "These numbers are all estimates but you can imagine if millions of website owners and Google Analytics users end up making a similar reduction in their website size too. The total reduction in the carbon footprint of the web would be immense."

If we removed 40k of CDN content per visit then the 1.8 kwh/GB would be 2.8 kwh/GB.

Wait, based on this calculation, transferring 1GB results in ~1KG of CO2? That sounds insane.

I mean 10k requests/second seems quite achievable for a single server. And I'd totally believe that 12 seconds of compute (per year!) wouldn't use much energy. In reality those requests would be intermixed with millions more for other sites and the servers would be running continuously, but the resources attributable to an individual site should be the same.

I mean, let's think about this a bit. The US generated about 4.13 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2019, and that generation emitted about 1.72 billion metric tons of CO2, or about 0.92 pounds of CO2 per kWh (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php). Let's assume Google gets their power at that rate (which is unfair to Google because they claim to use 100% renewable energy, but I don't want to get into that).

A typical server rack might use anywhere from maybe 5-50 kWh. Let's say Google has really beefy ones that consume 100 kWh per hour. That's 92 pounds of CO2 per hour. For the 12 seconds you mentioned, that's still only 0.011 kilograms of total CO2 used. And the claim is that they're BETTER by 4.5 kilograms.

They've gotta be talking about some other expense than the server. But what sort of expense? The cost to build a server? Something about general maintenance of the Internet? ISPs between clients and the server?

Of they are this bad at Fermi estimates of carbon emission, I can only imagine how bad they are at web analytics.

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