[nosefurhairdo]

Blaming a reduction in transaction costs for increased consumption is seriously missing the mark. I don't know if there's data for this, but I can imagine that by improving the online shopping experience Shopify could have reduced the amount of unnecessary physical shopping trips thereby indirectly reducing carbon emissions.

This analysis out of MIT would support that theory: https://ctl.mit.edu/pub/thesis/environmental-analysis-us-onl...

Fortunately, you are not the dictator of "necessary" consumption.

[abdullahkhalids]

Looking at Fig 2 in the Executive Summary pdf, most of the CO2e emissions for physical shopping is from customer transportation to store - between 50-80% for the various scenarios they considered. For online shopping about 50% of the emissions are from packaging.

The main lessons I see are

- If you drive, then switching to online will reduce emissions by about 30%.

- If you don't drive, and instead bus or walk to shopping stores, then your emissions will be about 10-20% of the car-drivers or online shoppers.