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Comment by shadowfaxRodeo | Hacker News Reader

Given the latest IPCC report, I thought it would be worth sharing this site about sustainable web design.

The internet is responsible for around 5% of global carbon emissions. It's difficult to measure, and generally not visible to the public.

The solution however is fairly simple — use less data.

Fast, accessible websites usually produce less CO2 and we already know how to do that. Now we just need to get web developers to do it. This will require:

- educating developers and designers - smart defaults for web developers - fostering competition - making the invisible cost of the internet visible

This is a reletively new dicipline — so anything you have to add to the mix will have a large impact.

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> The internet is responsible for around 5% of global carbon emissions.

Right, the internet (not necessarily the web)

> The solution however is fairly simple — use less data

Agreed.

> Fast, accessible websites usually produce less CO2

That's a drop in the bucket. If you look at what's _actually_ using data on the internet, it's streaming services (netflix, zoom, spotify). Fast, accessible websites have plenty of benefits, but if you want to actually reduce the amount of waste, far more effective solutions are things like lowering your video quality slightly (backgrounding futurama? Drop it to 480p.)

Can someone concisely explain how using more data in a general sense is contributing to CO2 emissions? I mean, if I use Bittorrent for example, the data is flowing through ISPs and from users' computers. I imagine the impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things. For hosted service I understand there's some cost to the datacenters used to serve the data, but the processing certainly has much more of an impact.

At the end of the day, the real culprit is the infrastructure, and emergence of tech giants who don't have environmental sustainability anywhere in their mission.

The difference between idle and load energy consumption of switches, routers, etc

>The solution however is fairly simple — use less data. About what, 99% of which is video streaming? Not scripts. Sorry to harp on you man but every time somebody pats themselves on the back for switching off a light, and feels ok flying across the world because they have no perspective on the relative impacts, the problem is perpetuated. And by directing people's attention to extremely relatively negligible areas for effort, you are causing people to waste literal energy.

Video streaming is about 60% of the web. Not 99%.

But, in what sense in video streaming not part of the web?

Sustainable web design is just as applicable to streaming as e-commerce or a blog.

It’s also not at all the same as turning off a lightbulb.

It’s more like one action resulting in turning off millions of other peoples light bulbs.

I haven't checked the figures put forward here but anything that encourages the industry to improve site performance - and an indirect result of these efforts seems to do just that - is greatly welcomed. Now when you want to argue against the embedding of another framework/library and the usual performance reasons don't cut it, just say it's about sustainable design.

I just read Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood, one of the makers of the linked site.

One of the points he made was that it's very difficult to sell sustainable design, and much easier to just tell clients it's about performance.

His other observation was that clients care a lot if you tell them their competitor is doing environmentalism better.

> The internet is responsible for around 5% of global carbon emissions.

How much of that is high quality video streaming? How much could be reduced by forbiddin resolutions over 1080p for example?

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