Start calculating digital carbon emissions in 5 minutes with CO2.js (2022)
thegreenwebfoundation.org
thegreenwebfoundation.org
Added to that the opportunities for charging the various parties for "certification" are simply too good to pass up it seems.
People want to be good. The current agenda God says you are good if you sacrifice to the CO2 god. No need to make reliable assertions to feel good about it. Anyone who challenges the act of sacrifice is someone to burn. No challenge means no problems.
Anyone who wants to see both sides of the Co2 discussion is already sceptical at minimum. But it does not make you feel good. Therefore its rare. It feels good to sacrifice to the Co2 god. “Lemme sacrifice you fool.”
Not only is it measuring bytes blindly, it's counting rating your energy use as a % of bytes sent, versus total data-center consumption period. As though every byte is equally responsible for the total computing done. Absurdly wrongheaded model.
It's not just attributing bytes
I’d rather not kiss the global ecosystem goodbye
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619672
I think CodeCarbon (the python library) might have a better method for estimating carbon usage. They seem to be digging it up on a per-power station basis. Would love to see the join forces.
Edit (25 minutes later): a phone screen seems to use about 1W more on a white background than a very dark one from what I could quickly find on mobile (https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mod...). 5 billion people seem to use phones for some 4.4h/day (https://backlinko.com/smartphone-usage-statistics). Assuming 70% uses OLED worldwide (probably much less, but I can't quickly find a source for this) and 50% of the time is spent on reading text (not tiktok videos or whatever, where you can't use dark theme), that's 2.8 TWh per year. About 178'000 TWh of energy are used by the world per year (https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption).
So this should save 0.002% in this best-case scenario where every text-based application switches to nearly black backgrounds and most people have OLED screens and people actually use their device for text at least as much as for media consumption.
Is that worth it? Maybe, but perhaps not as effective as not loading megabytes of JavaScript on every page, not downloading ads and tracking on every page, and funding low-carbon electricity generation needed for your systems. Wikipedia already is pretty good on the first two afaik, the latter I can't easily tell beyond saying in 2019 they're doing a "best effort" in buying green-labeled electricity and making an inventory of other emissions like plane travel (https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/09/19/how-the-wiki...)