Never noticed News.YC's CO2Stats before. How do they compute this stuff anyway?

Smoke, mirrors, reading of dead chicken entrails...<p>You know, the usual PT Barnum stuff to impress the rubes.<p>Interesting paragraph from their site: "CO2Stats reserves the right to cap REC purchases in case of excessive use, as its own discretion."<p>That is, you could pay them $100 a month and they may or may not purchase offsets to cover your 5 million page views.

I guess mirroring the OP, I like this concept behind C02Stats, but I am very curious as to how this is precisely calculated (or even roughly estimated.) Do CO2Stats know the power grid the servers are on? How do they account for the disparity in power usage behind different systems (a mainframe != laptop)? Without having detailed knowledge of a building, how could they possibly know about air conditioning costs or other secondary electricity use (lights, etc)?

Great question! We measure quite a variety of signals, including but not limited to client locations (e.g., is traffic coming from coal-burning areas?), visit lengths, server locations, transfer sizes, transfer times, and window sizes. These signals are fed into a "hand-built" database that allows us to compute aggregate carbon footprints.

Hey CO2Stats - A couple questions for you:<p>How do you account for different monitor sizes, types and brands and poor wasteful electricity in older buildings?<p>Thanks!

Inspect the data that their "complex heuristics"-based widget sends back about the client.  I'm positive that you'll be pleasantly surprised at the <i>breadth</i> of information.... or, it sends nearly nothing.  And nothing of relevance to actual consumption.  But c'mon, CO2Stats is totally legit, guys... really...

Interesting concept. What I don't understand is why as someone running a website I should offset the CO2 from my data center, my client's homes and the networks between them.

Math.random()<p>I don't think the numbers matter. It's just a badge to say "We're green" isn't it? Seems like it's leveraging off the current "CO2 is evil" fad.

Instead of a seal that nobody cares for (hack-proof, privacy seals are OK, but green-certified seal?), why don't they enter the carbon credits market?<p>This seems like a misuse of technology. Use this technology to help companies trade carbon credits. A few bulge bracket banks are already in this game. They buy carbon credits from African cooperatives cheaply and sell them at a healthy profit to factories who need these credits.<p>And they are making millions from it. What are you waiting for guys?