Fad or relevant?
Marketing bullshit that appeals to some low-information, vibes-based liberals.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Greenwashing for profit.
Pretty much. Being liberal myself, it drives me insane seeing the absolute triple people will buy into. Websites aren't the things to target, let's look at things like cruise ships and transitioning to renewable energy.
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Greenwashing, can't believe this even is a question
Plus, it ignores that most websites couldn't reliably tell you how much carbon emissions they'd be responsible for individually. That's a super-complicated question to answer.
Part of the issue is that electricity is fungible. If I consume one watt-hour from my grid, I don't get to decide where it comes from. The mix of generation is the same for everyone on that grid. Even if you segregate the grids in order to vaguely guarantee that you are only consuming green sources, you're also making the "dirty" grid cheaper and thus easier for everyone else to use, and there are plenty of ways of capitalizing on that difference that nullifies the segregation. It's a bit like arbitrage.
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I personally think it's kind of dumb as hell. I'm not sure how you would know but also websites are a tiny fraction of emissions. If you want to lower emissions it's much more effective to go for legislation local to you.
So uh. What the fuck does that mean?
Stupid and meaningless.
If I had to take a wild guess giving benefit of the doubt it checks the total bytes downloaded and CPU usage to estimate electricity usage.
With a combination of checking which data centers its hosted out of and if they are using certified renewable energy etc
Yes it checks whether the data centers bought their green, green washed, or green washed plus premium package.
That tells us almost nothing about a website's carbon impact. I could serve a 4k uhd movie from my personal website and it wouldn't even be 1% of the impact from Reddit for 1 second. We need to know how much traffic a site gets for those numbers to matter.
While I understand and agree with you, the obvious counterargument is how many people get serviced and the generated value of them being served. I mean people won't argue that a car is better than a bus because the car produces less carbon. What I think is the better way to highlight the ridiculousness of those icons, a newspaper website produces more carbon (if energy source is producing carbon) than a server that just return the certification icon. So newspaper website is worse? That is how this certification works... Low information density gets rewarded. Which is contra productive if the goal is an energy efficient web.
To be fair, the service in the screenshot, tries to estimate the average carbon over the year and collects data to improve estimated that counter some of my critic, but it doesn't fix the ignorance to the kind of data provided and rewards low data density to some degree
If this encourages light, fast loading pages, I'm all for it.
The future is no JavaScript!!
I wish.
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My website is running off of spare resources on my 10w router, and yet my 30w monitor that I've been using for 10+ years still says that I've saved exactly 0.0 trees every time I turn it on. Thank you, now please fuck off with that bullshit.
What the hell is a green website
https://www.vandelaydesign.com/green-websites/
Those are green websites /s
Probably a better unit of measurement than this green washed bullshit.
Pretty sure taking a single billionaireβs jet out of the sky will make more of a difference than anything these certificates could achieve.
But he pays people who weren't going to cut down their trees to not cut down their trees so he can have a carbon neutral jet!
(The above sentence is an example of sarcasm.)
I wish he would pay me not to cut down my trees.
Whatever it is, itβs a joke. Things like this just take the focus off the people actually causing the problem.
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Same as "carbon footprint" - meaningless greenwashed bullshit there to shift focus away from those responsible, and the true scale of the damage they're causing for money.
If anything - seeing that kind of certification would make me actively avoid a company because you know they're at best using it to virtue signal for profits, at worst and more likely, they're using it to cover up much much worse shit they're doing.
Out of curiosity I've let it rate Low<-Tech Magazine, a website run on an ARM SBC powered exclusively with off-grid solar power, and that only achieves 87% / A.
That is because they didn't pay their membership fee
Eheh nice one to test! If there's a 100% it should be that one
It's completely negligible compared to industrial manufacturing, bitcoin mining, waste, etc.
Make a lighter website because no one gives a shit about a heavy one.
I recently saw it reported that Crypto was 2% of US electric use.
That's a whole lot of wasted processing, silicon, heat and energy.
If ESG is anything to go by, just a greenwashing fad they'll drop as soon as it doesn't have the desired effect
relevant if it sabotages coal mining infrastructure
The Carbon footprint of a website is hard to determine and given the examples posted in this thread, I would not trust their conclusions.
It is about as useful as a bullshit milkshake is to a vegan.
stupid but if it removes useless bloat and data farming im for it
Huh? 
How tf can my website produce less than 0g pf emissions?
Ecosia plants trees for every search request. So technically it removes co2 every time you visit the site.
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We are getting dumber
Is it too difficult to post some context?
This appears to be the calculator: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
And it only appears to check the size of downloaded assets and then whether the hosting provider is known to use renewables. Indeed not terribly exhaustive or useful.
Is it ending capitalism? If not, it's greenwashing. Any action other than stopping the one thing fucking up our planet is a distraction.
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For all the comments that say βthe real problem isβ¦β: this is crisis and working on all emission sources contributes to a solution not just the biggest emitters.
Everything we online has an impact in the real world and thereβs some value in reminding people that. And yes, some sites could be causing a lot emissions than others.
Some are powered by solar, others by coal.
ARM chips are more energy efficient than x86 and so on.
You can invent the worlds most energy efficient CPU, put it on every server rack in the world, and all your progress will be undone by that one billionaire who decides they want international taco bell at 3 AM.
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That's fucking stupid.
Mostly seems a bit silly but I think if people were making any sort of large decisions based on it, I would probably raise an eyebrow. But I like the idea of people considering the environmental impact of everything they do. Crypto Bros sure couldβve used that lesson.
Itβs not like itβs doing any harm unless people put too much stock into it. Like the energy star rating on my HVAC unit - itβs just information to me. Itβs not like Iβm making major decisions based off of it or getting the feel goods. No reason this canβt be like that.
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