Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>If we're serious about this climate crisis/change business, someone needs to cast a very hard look at google and meta for these sorts of shenanigans

By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change. Going after them to solve climate change makes as much sense as plastic straw or bag bans.

View on HN

IT is emitting around as much as aviation, and that was a surprise to me, most of it are due to client devices. Don’t have the source at hand at the moment though. And of that, most emissions are upfront until you buy it. Buying a new device because it’s not fast anymore causes emissions, not running it. Think about e-waste as well.

>IT is emitting around as much as aviation

What counts as "IT"? It's most certainly a superset of "client devices", which is what my and the parent comment was talking about.

It has a cumulative effect and drives the continual "upgrade" cycle. When you consider the life-time of an average mobile device, and the resources required to manufacture and ship them, it's a not insignificant problem.

Random source from google[1]:

>Berners-Lee writes that in 2020, there were 7.7 billion mobile phones in use, with a footprint of roughly 580 million tonnes of CO2e. This equates to approximately 1% of all global emissions

Of course, not everyone is replacing their phones yearly. Another source[2] says the average consumer phone is 3 years old. That works out to 0.33% of global emissions, assuming the phones aren't recycled/reused to developing countries. Even if assume people are upgrading their phones for app/web performance reasons, the impact is far less than 1%.

[1] https://reboxed.co/blogs/outsidethebox/the-carbon-footprint-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphon...

Isn’t that quite huge number to be fair?

Compared to a single person's emissions? Yeah sure, but that's because anything multiplied by 8 billion people is going to be huge. The same could be said for plastic bags and/or straws. In relative terms it's absolutely minuscule, and in terms of low hanging fruit it's definitely not the top. You'd be far better off figuring out ways to decarbonize the electricity grid (40%) or the transport system (20%)

To be clear, these emissions include the manufacturing cost, which for reasonable users seems to make up ~80-90% of the carbon footprint. The power usage of the phone itself and associated data centres etc is only a small portion.

It's still somewhat surprising that one could attribute 0.2% of global emissions solely to phone power consumption... I would have expected it to be lower.

I would imagine for phones and laptops the extraction of materials (rare earth metals to make fancy new chips, lithium for batteries,etc) is probably the bigger issue.

Having gotten away from 500+ watt desktops as the standard for light non-gaming computing has been a win in the energy consumption court.

I think there are lots of good reasons to avoid the upgrade cycle but energy consumption of the end device itself probably isn't it. (Embodied energy of the devices, environmental impacts of mining, no good EOL story for ewaste, etc)

> By all accounts client devices' energy consumption is a rounding error in terms of contribution to climate change.

It adds up? How many devices are there? Tens of billions?

Web 345 devs just don't care because the costs are borne by the customer.

The customer doesn't care either because a page that takes 5s longer to load on a 1W TDP SoC costs them around one-millionth of a penny. Even if you're refreshing 100 times per day it's only around 0.05 kWh per year, which at any reasonable electricity prices is a sum that's simply not worth worrying about. You'd get more savings from getting people to turn off their led light bulbs for a few minutes.

US centric electricity prices view :)

Also, it's not just your site. It's every site. And the customer pays all those millionths of a penny added up out of their pocket. And all those 5 second delays out of their lifetime.

Edit: btw at a quick glance you underestimated cell phone soc TDP by a 2-4 factor.

A single use of an electric kettle sounds like it would completely dominate this consumption.

The time cost is certainly the greatest expense here, power is cheap in consumer computing contexts, generally speaking (at least nowadays with most things racing to sleep), and is mostly relevant because of battery life, not power cost.

> A single use of an electric kettle sounds like it would completely dominate this consumption.

But at least that gets you tea, instead of engagement.

You've got to put X joules in to boil Y liters of water. No choice there, except giving up on the tea.

You can greatly reduce the joules necessary to see cat photos though. And you don't have to give up on seeing the cat photos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com