Following this line of thought, the Hacker News homepage should receive an Energy Star award from the EPA for not having insulting auto-play videos, 20 CPU-burning JavaScript trackers, 5 webfonts, and 40 useless images like others do.
This is why you need something like a price on carbon emissions to actually fix global warming. Who can keep track of all these factors creating emissions? Price signals propagating through the economy could fix this, whereas a programmers optimising their JS frameworks and runtime performance to account for their carbon emissions will never happen.
I don't understand why this essay was written. It's an interesting train of thought until you actually compare savings it proposes with real world data.<p>The iMessage case is particularly horrid, the article states that 45 million images sent through the service daily produce an equivalent amount of CO2 as flying 11,000 people from Paris to New York. The images are uncompressed, but had only those anti-environment programmers somehow reduce their size by 50% without significantly degrading quality iMessage would only burn 5,500 worth of passengers in jet fuel daily!<p>Such a big save, until you compare it with the amount of total number of daily airline passengers, which is 13 million [1]. In comparison that's 0.04%, which wouldn't even make the tiniest scratch and you're proposing to degrade a service that's daily used by 1.3 billion people.<p>Taking the quote from the text: "The moment we create digital products or services we become part of the problem." it seems a huge stretch the intentions of which I can only speculate on.<p>The whole point seems incredibly stupid, but I'd really like to be proven wrong.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.icao.int/annual-report-2018/Pages/the-world-of-air-transport-in-2018.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.icao.int/annual-report-2018/Pages/the-world-of-a...</a>
Interesting train of thought, but most of the example feel to me like overly-specific, "premature optimization".<p>The thing is, software developers are already roughly incentivized to optimize for efficiency. And UX designers are already roughly incentivized to optimize for smooth interaction.<p>There are a few tragedy-of-the-commons cases; web ads being the obvious example, both in terms of bandwidth and in terms of client-side CPU usage. There's also the fact that developer time is so much more expensive than cloud hosting, which incentivizes companies to be careless with their server usage. These could possibly benefit from some kind of carbon tax, to help align incentive.<p>But the other thing is: the vast majority of this cost does not come down to what the author is talking about. Crypto mining is an <i>enormous</i> expenditure of energy for dubious purpose. I would wager it creates more carbon than the entire internet. And streaming is <i>several orders of magnitude</i> larger than regular web pages (though this is already strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible). I cannot imagine that optimizing YouTube's logo even <i>registers</i> in comparison to its video streams.<p>All in all: it's a good lens through which to look at things, but most of the emissions sources are either a) already being made as efficient as possible, or b) created by parties who could not be bothered to care without an adjustment of incentives.
>into the world. Binge-watching shows on Netflix for a month straight contributes to as much carbon emissions as a flight from London to New York<p>I was under the impression that one of the primary costs of airfare was fuel? I get that power plants are using a cheaper type of fuel than jet fuel, but some back of the envelope math suggests that netflix must be getting their fuel/energy for at least an order of magnitude less then airplanes are getting their fuel/energy. It implies that if you binge watch enough shows on netflix they're actually making a sizable loss on energy costs alone...
Not all energy is equal. If your data center is primarily energized with coal, then yes, that's going to have a big carbon footprint. If most of the energy comes from wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric, then there is little or no carbon footprint.
It’s true, and definitely high priority right now. After all, we used to be able to see the Himilayas, but when everyone went into their homes and started streaming Netflix, the internet smog overwhelmed them!<p>Sending or not sending an email will not meaningfully increase power usage and thereby pollution of those large data centers. More efficient code will help; but, there are so much bigger fish to fry, I think I will happily tolerate a huge increase in internet usage for a dramatic reduction of cars.
> If the Internet was a country, it would be the 6th largest polluter in the world.<p>This is a pretty interesting claim, so I tried to follow the source to see how they arrived at this. It links to this article by Nature [1] but it doesn't have the the quoted text the author seemed to have quoted.<p>I'm not trying to dispute the claim, I'm just interested in learning more about the data which led to it. Anyone have a peer reviewed article about this?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y</a>
Docker and Kubernetes are the worst offenders then. Modern DevOps often fire up a separate container for the smallest service.
Another huge chunk of the "pollution" is the bytecode and interpreted languages. Getting rid of the languages and VMs without AOT-compilation will reduce the carbon footprint a lot.
>According to research on Wonder (Wonder, 2016) an average of 1.8 billion digital images are loaded (globally) each day, totaling around 657 billion photos sent per year. Unfortunately, the percentage of images sent with iMessage is unknown. To make an estimation, we will use WhatsApp's statistics as a placeholder. 2.5% of the messages sent through their service are images. So on a daily basis, assuming this is the same for iMessage, 45,000,000 images are sent through the app everyday.<p>That is some weird arithmetic. Multiplying the number of images they think are circulating online each day by the percent of images from total messages they think iMessage sends, does not total the supposed volume of the images sent through iMessage.<p>But perhaps it doesn't matter for the purpose of the article to have proper data and proper arithmetic. Such puny details as proper data and arithmetic can not delay your fighting for a great cause.
There was a talk by Hennessy and Patterson, winners of the 2017 Turing Award (I forget which one, it might have been their Turing Award lecture), where they said basically: software engineers are not good as solving performance problems, all the big improvements are really done at the hardware level. I wonder if something similar applies here.<p>We can certainly improve things in a number of small ways through better software, and when we can we should. Is that what's really going to fix the problem? Or will the problem really only be solved by having efficient energy cell storage coupled with non-carbon based energy sources meaning that large server farms produce no pollution? Not fundamentally changing one's behavior other than using 40kb files instead of 80kb files for sending memes to one's friends seems like it's more about letting one to not feel bad about one's self.
One way software could help reduce pollution is if receipts go completely digital. I know not all people have easy electronic access but stores could have kiosks or something to access receipts. It’s just absurd grocery stores and places like CVS still print so much useless paper that people instantly throw away.
This stuff is a lie.<p>Netflix has obviously been disproven, start here for some numbers- <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-on-netflix" rel="nofollow">https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-is-the-carbon-foo...</a><p>Self-flagellation is thousands of years old, so there must be a reason the environmental movement took it up.<p>But the reason might not be good.
There was a talk by Hennessy and Patterson, winners of the 2017 Turing Award (I forget which one, it might have been their Turing Award lecture), where they said basically: software engineers are not good as solving performance problems, all the big improvements are really done at the hardware level. I wonder if something similar applies here.<p>We can certainly improve things in a number of small ways through better software, and when we can we should. Is that what's really going to fix the problem? Or will the problem really only be solved by having efficient energy cell storage coupled with non-carbon based energy sources meaning that large server farms produce no pollution? Not fundamentally changing one's behavior other than using 40kb files instead of 80kb files for sending memes to one's friends seems like it's more there for one to not feel bad about one's self for not having solved the problem.
This endless pearl clutching over releasing an additional N grams of carbon is driving me crazy. Internalize the externalities and let’s move on with our lives. This is not a productive thing to spend so much brain power worrying about.
BBSes are still alive and well [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/lists/new-bbs-systems/" rel="nofollow">https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/lists/new-bbs-systems/</a>
Let's just not do anything that's not necessary for survival. I'm all for reducing emissions, we should focus on things like the 15mb web pages with a thousand ads and trackers first, though.