What are your thoughts on website eco certification?
What are your thoughts on website eco certification?
Fad or relevant?
Marketing bullshit that appeals to some low-information, vibes-based liberals.
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.
Implying they're not all vibes-based liberals. (try avoid using low-information due to its ties with the racist dogwhistle "low-information voter")
I’ve never seen low-information voter used as a racist dog whistle, at least not when it was first used during the Obama years. Has it been used differently since?
UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, 2012: Dumb and dumber: The 'low-information' voter:As the U.S. presidential campaign heats up, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are piling up money and shoring up their political bases. But they're also going after a few million voters in a handful of swing states — voters considered critical to winning the election. And within this bloc of voters is a special camp: "low-information voters," or LIVs, a term that keeps popping up in magazines and political blogs.
The term is mainly used by liberals to refer to those who vote conservative against their interests and the best interests of the nation. It assumes they vote that way because they lack sufficient information about issues. The assumption being, of course, that if only they had the real facts, they would vote differently — for both their own best interests and those of the nation.
The problem is that, as neutral as the term "low-information voters" may sound, it's pejorative and used to express frustration with these voters, who (we're told) act against their own best interests. Liberals tend to attribute the problem in large part to conscious Republican efforts at misinformation — say, on Fox News or talk radio — and in part to faulty information gleaned from friends, family and random sources.
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.
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.
If this encourages light, fast loading pages, I'm all for it.
The future is no JavaScript!!
I wish.
Lies are good if I like one of the outcomes they promote!
It was kind of a joke response.
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.
Pretty sure taking a single billionaire’s 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, it’s a joke. Things like this just take the focus off the people actually causing the problem.
Yeah, this goes into the same bin as carbon offset. Just because you had a couple trees planted in one part of the world you should not be allowed to polute the rivers in another part of the world.
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.
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
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.
If ESG is anything to go by, just a greenwashing fad they'll drop as soon as it doesn't have the desired effect
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.
Is it ending capitalism? If not, it's greenwashing. Any action other than stopping the one thing fucking up our planet is a distraction.
Communism will save the environment.
The Carbon footprint of a website is hard to determine and given the examples posted in this thread, I would not trust their conclusions.
relevant if it sabotages coal mining infrastructure
stupid but if it removes useless bloat and data farming im for it
It is about as useful as a bullshit milkshake is to a vegan.
We are getting dumber
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 could’ve used that lesson.
It’s not like it’s doing any harm unless people put too much stock into it. Like the energy star rating on my HVAC unit - it’s just information to me. It’s not like I’m making major decisions based off of it or getting the feel goods. No reason this can’t be like that.
I like the energy star because if you skip past the marketing and look at the label it tells you how many watts the device uses. Super useful!
Exactly. It also gives you an annual estimate of the electric costs. I have no idea how accurate it is, but since they all use the same rating, I can at least compare on the fly if I am so inclined.
For all the comments that say “the real problem is…”: 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 there’s 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.
On the other hand, you can approach the dramatic cut of emissions from both angles, as in "you are not legally able to do what you want as long as you can pay for it, and you have the responsibility in minimizing emissions".
Internet does generate a lot of emissions. Streaming quality, website size. Whatever we do to reduce the energy demand is a good idea, as long as we don't think of it as " The Solution", but as part of a wide range of actions aimed at slashing energy consumption.
We can have a real impact by focusing hard enough on 0.00001% of the problem!
Oh wait, no, we can't.
There are lots folks and lots of problems. We don’t have to focus. We can work on many aspects at the same time, big and small.
That's fucking stupid.
HTTP, serving properly tagged semantic HTML file, with optional styling via CSS, and if you really want JavaScript for animations and live updates.
Thank you.
I've never seen an example of "properly tagged semantic HTML" or truly optional CSS outside of toy examples meant to illustrate the concept.
But it doesn't matter, because serving website content is an utterly insignificant to contributor to global warming.
A lot of websites use html tags correctly, especially some of the better news websites
BBC is good example of semantic web
Virtue signalling at its worst. It's completely meaningless.
ecosia
I wouldn’t visit a website that had that, and if it was a company, I’d stop using their product.
