[draaglom]

Domestic computer use simply isn't a big fraction of a person's total energy consumption:

e.g. this study[1] in the UK puts "IT" as <6% of household electricity use, which is itself a fraction of a person's total energy use.

edit: and this[2] indicates that datacenter usage is also not very significant.

Therefore, no amount of optimising web pages will make a meaningful difference to carbon output.

As web professionals, it's better if we direct our focus towards more productive areas around this goal -- by e.g. donating to relevant campaign groups, or using our tech skills to produce media on the topic.

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[2]: https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...

[LeifCarrotson]

Exactly.

If I hypothetically ran an inefficient 500W dedicated server 24/7 for one 8760 hour year, and my electric utility produces 1 lbs of CO2 per kwh, that's about 2 tons of CO2 due to my programming habits per year.

Last year, I had a long commute and an inefficient vehicle. 1 gallon of gas produces 20 lbs of CO2, I got about 18 mpg, and drove 25,000 miles, mostly due to commuting, so my driving added 12.5 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Instead of making my computing more efficient, I changed jobs and vehicles. Now I drive 2.5 miles to work, at 30 mpg, fill up maybe once a month instead of twice a week, and am much happier for it! If I spent extra time to do more efficient programming, I could have decimated my server's power bill, and could have saved almost 1.9 tons of CO2, but by spending that time looking for a better job and better commute, which were far more extreme, I saved about 10 tons of CO2 instead.

[chrisballinger]

If you’re concerned about your carbon footprint and live within 2.5 miles of work, you might want to consider a bicycle instead! Regular cycling has made a profoundly positive impact to my life, and I would highly encourage you to explore that as an option.

[gonzo41]

I think you're right. I've been thinking for a while that the real future in electric vehicles is not Teslas or any EV to replace a car but Ebikes. Cheap, great range and you're getting some exercise and for every person on a bike. Other traffic flows better.

[Eric_WVGG]

I'll go a step further and say that this is in a way more wasteful. For the previous commute, driving was at least necessary. Driving 2.5 miles is like having a gas-powered robot fetch the morning newspaper.

[NegativeLatency]

Ebikes are good options too

[reaperducer]

If you’re concerned about your carbon footprint

If he was concerned about his carbon footprint, he would think producing 2 tons of CO2 a year through programming to be unimportant.

[codyb]

Are those numbers accurate? Am I literally releasing _two tons_ of CO2 into the atmosphere per year just by programming?

I mean, I'm certain I'm not hitting 500W just on my MBP, but with the TV, and Switch, and the rest.

2 tons? That's staggering. Would it really weight 4000 lbs??

That's absolutely a mind blowing moment for me and I'm probably going to spend some time in the near future figuring out how much carbon my relatively low footprint (no commute, bike lots, public transportation the rest, etc) lifestyle is producing.

I think I've got some old electricity bills, and of course it must depend on your power source.

Just wild to think about how many _tons_ of CO2 are now floating around because of just my lonesome if a computer can produce multiple tons a year.

[firebaze]

Still, atmospheric CO² is the food for plant life. We're overdoing the output of CO² by ~3 orders of magnitude, granted, but I'd guess 500W on top of basic needs should be in the ballpark of sustainability for a living entity on top of the food chain.

[zelon88]

While I'm not disagreeing with your math, your 500w server only draws 500w at load. Most of the time its probably drawing under 175w.

[richajak]

I have several computers at home, but most of the time I use my 65W laptop. I am afraid my 350W desktop computer will increase my electricity bill if I use it too much.

[crazygringo]

Exactly. This is a perfect example of missing the forest for the trees.

All of us only have a finite amount of time/attention we can spend on things like the environment. It we truly care, then it's our obligation to spend that time on the changes that have the biggest impact.

Let's discuss energy usage of the web once it makes its way into the top 100 areas of potential impactful improvement. Until then, let's put our effort into pressuring our politicians into enacting meaningful change where it matters.

[menybuvico]

The one thing that could be done is to keep bloat to a minimum. It makes the web faster and less energy use is merely a bonus.

[atonse]

I remember doing the math of how much energy a phone uses per year, and thought I got it wrong, since it was so little.

And it's similar with computers, as you've stated (especially with Laptops that are already pretty energy efficient).

I'm not sure what we can do as web professionals honestly, but as technologists in general, maybe more of us can apply our engineering mindsets to actual climate change problems instead of building a 50th ad analytics platform.

[XCSme]

> maybe more of us can apply our engineering mindsets to actual climate change problems

Any suggestions on how can you do that as an individual? You can easily create a generic software product alone, but to helping the climate change is really hard. OP asked exactly this, what can we do. So, what can we do instead of the 50th analytics platform?

[saltcured]

I don't know if this was the intent, but I think an "engineering mindset" can mean analysis and heuristics for balancing costs and benefits to choose practical solutions. It does not have to be conflated with "product design" or other market-scale strategies.

In other words, you can use some engineering methodology to review and change your own behaviours as an individual and reduce your impact on climate. Perhaps after that, you can try to influence a few people around you. You should not let yourself get trapped in a mindset that any idea has to produce some viral sensation with however many million monthly users or else be discarded.

I think that techie/engineer types can sometimes develop a rather large blindspot to the many things in their daily lives that come from culture and habit. We can modeswitch from highly analytical and perhaps even obsessive optimizers on a work problem, then go repeat some inefficient or counter-productive activity in our personal lives for the umpteenth time without ever recognizing that these are also things which can be analyzed and challenged...

[minkeymaniac]

You can maybe start charging some of these mobile devices via Solar Power Bank https://amzn.to/2RE10uT They can charge while you walk around by placing the panels on your backpack...

I know it's a small percentage of overall use, but if enough people start using solar to charge their devices and maybe in the future laptop batteries, cars and houses it's a step in the right direction

The biggest offender is the AC in the summer in the US... office is so cold people have to bring sweaters and vests

[throwaway894345]

I don’t doubt the conclusion, but does the 6% figure account for the energy cost at the data center and network nodes, or is it just the power for the user’s devices? (I’m a bit too lazy to skim through that 600 page PDF)

[draaglom]

the 6% is electricity consumption within the home; the second link puts datacenter usage at 1% of global electricity consumption.

[simongr3dal]

You aren't going to find any one category of thing that uses a "significant" fraction of total electrical energy or fossil fuel. Dismissing efforts because of that won't lead to meaningful betterment.

[dangerface]

The 2% use for IT is insignificant in contrast to the 28% used for transport which is the most significant.

If you truly want meaningful betterment you need metrics to focus your time and effort where it will have the most impact. If you spend all your time focusing on the most insignificant thing you can make massive progress in that thing and no progress toward meaningful betterment.

Focus is very important.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis....

[acituan]

Around 90% of energy production of the world comes from coal, oil and gas, with each around 30% contribution. Simply changing our energy sources will lead to the most meaningful betterment.

[Ixiaus]

As individuals, I agree. Producing media and computational tools are where we can help the most. Our industry is already geared towards "caring" (in the economic sense, not the emotional sense) about efficiency anyway. e.g. laptops have become more and more efficient, servers are more efficient (especially those deployed at big cloud vendors who care a lot about efficiency.)

Overall I'm not that concerned about our usage as it's not that bad and the industry is already rewarded for producing more efficient machines to compute.

That said, I've always thought it would be a cool project to use formal methods to prove efficiency properties or to quantify and prove the trade-offs between some more efficient algorithm and a greedier algorithm (especially in distributed systems.) But, most of that feels like developer mental masturbation in comparison to the much more egregious sorts of inefficiencies facing us (many of which require both social and technical solutions - the social one being the hardest.)

[draaglom]

See also: Bret Victor's excellent "What can a technologist do about Climate Change": http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

[legulere]

Did you even click on the link ? The first paragraph is about how a lot of energy is used outside the household and how it’s rapidly growing.

Sure your phone is using almost no power, but the network infrastructure and the servers you are using use a ridiculous amount of power.

[reaperducer]

e.g. this study[1] in the UK puts "IT" as <6% of household electricity use, which is itself a fraction of a person's total energy use.

Why does it matter? Isn't any improvement, by definition, a good thing?

If changing some of our programming methodologies saves 1% of the world's energy, that's massive.

1% of UK energy would be 22TWh — a massive amount of energy. Just because when it's expressed as a percentage it's only 1% doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.

[kstrauser]

As a corollary, since the most carbon-expensive part of a computing project is the humans that maintain it, a variation of Amdahl's law says we should optimize for human efficiency if we want to reduce the carbon footprint.

Some things are a no-brainer, like allowing remote work when possible: that's an enormous energy savings.

It also means that development speed is much more important than execution speed in most cases. For example, yes, Python is a "slow" language. But in almost every case, it makes more sense for devs to deploy a website in Python than, say, hand-tuned assembler. The latter may require fewer clock cycles to run, but it's going to require 100x the resources to implement. That gets more difficult to quantify if you're trying to compare, say, Rust vs Go where both require similar amounts of development effort and the end performance is similar, but I think you can reasonably say that modern, high level languages are more carbon efficient than lower level ones that take longer to develop in most cases (like, that might not hold in cases of supercomputing where you're executing the code a gazillion times in parallel).

[sixplusone]

But humans don't hibernate between tasks. I continue living, using about the same amount of energy and oxygen. When one project is done, move on to the next (or have to come up with something else to do).

[kstrauser]

Sure, but look at the transportation costs alone for getting you to the office and back every day. I'd bet in the common cases where a dev is writing a web app that's not FAANG-scale, you could power the server for 20 years on the energy it takes for you to get to work that one year.

Let's put this in concrete terms: it's surprising how much work you can get out of a Raspberry Pi. An RPi 4 is almost certainly enough to host many small companies' websites until they hit a traffic inflection point. A loaded RPi4 takes about 8 W/h to operate. A gallon of gasoline has about 33 kWh of energy in it, or about 4,000 hours of RPi running time. In other words, a single gallon of gas could run an RPi 4 for about 6 months.

Suppose it takes you a month (or about 20 commuting days) to write your startup's website in Flask, and that it takes you about 1 gallon of gas round trip to work and back. Your car alone just spend about 10 years worth of server power, which is statistically much longer than that website is likely to live.

Now suppose you're a badass programmer who can convert that Flask app into assembler that runs twice as efficiently, and it only takes you 1 month to write it. Now you've spent 40 gallons of gas, and your app can run for 40 years on the amount of energy you spent writing it.

You can fiddle with the numbers a lot, but I think the general point stands: unless your code is very heavily used, it may not be possible to ever break even energy-wise by spending human effort to make it run more efficiently.

[sixplusone]

Getting to work or staying home has nothing to do with whether I'm writing C or ruby.

For the next 30 years I have to put effort into something, and the number of tasks that need to be done never ends, no matter how quickly I complete them.

[Reedx]

Maybe, but imagine looping over this:

"How can we, as [profession], help to make [x] more energy efficient?"

It doesn't take long before that starts to add up.

[acituan]

Does it though? Numbers I look at don’t seem to support that.

I find these “as a profession” enactments more to be self-congratulory rituals than anything else. It is like trying to clear your disk storage space through deleting thousands of 1kb files while gigabytes of old movies are staying there hogging the most space.

Besides, I don’t understand why people has to be reduced to their professions. We are also citizens and voters, and the lion’s share of the change can only be done through policy.

The saying goes penny wise, pound foolish. Sometimes it is indeed foolish to focus on micro and miss the greater perspective.

[dangerface]

Exactly, think about the amount of time wasted on a solved problem. You could just run your servers from Iceland which has an abundance of renewable energy and spend all those man hours on unsolved problems.

[Apofis]

It costs $0.003 to fully charge your iPhone everyday.