#LetsGreenTheWeb Together!
Every website you use runs on a machine somewhere that pulls power (and likely cooling) to do its job and render the page on your screen. Creating that power creates carbon emissions of some scope. In fact, the internet is responsible for so much energy usage and carbon emissions that if it was a country, it would be the 7th largest polluter in the world (and growing). The Let’s Green The Web movement was started from the ClimateAction.tech group to use Twitter to drive awareness and action between Feb 15th and Feb 19th, 2021. I wanted to jump on the bandwagon here to help amplify this message but also to better understand my consumption patterns.
My Morning Website Routine, In Carbon
Roughly every morning, I have a routine set of sites that I check to catch up on email, weather, news, and social media from the nighttime and early East Coast time. Since the tool doesn’t support authenticated experiences, I will have to run these calculations for a logged-out experience. The sites in my morning routine include:
Gmail: 0.33g of CO2 produced every time someone visits this web page
Hey: 0.17g of CO2 produced every time someone visits this web page
Weather
Weather Underground (Seattle, WA): 4.23g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
News
Detroit News: 1.55g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
ESPN: 5.81g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
MGoBlog: 7.78g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
The Seattle Times: 1.28g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
Yahoo! Finance: 1.19g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
Hacker News: 0.01g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
AllSides: 1.86g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
Financial Times: 0.94g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
Social Media
Using my profile page on each of these services for a somewhat consistent logged-out calculation
Medium: 0.53g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
Twitter: 0.91g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
Strava: 0.88g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page
LinkedIn: ??? (WebsiteCarbon.com was not able to process this page)
Conclusion
Totaling these up I get 27.25g of carbon I’m indirectly responsible every morning:
Email: 0.5g total of CO2, 0.25g average CO2 per site
Weather: 4.23g total of CO2, 0.25g average CO2 per site
News: 20.42g total of CO2, 2.55g average CO2 per site
Social Media: 2.32g total of CO2, 0.77g average CO2 per site
Non-Surprises
I’m not shocked that news and media sites tend to use more CO2. The pages are typically text-dense, media-rich, and have multiple advertisement sections. Hacker News and its minimalist design barely registering CO2 seems to prove that theory. I love Weather Underground’s Storm mobile app for quick checks and radar tracking. Their website is quite slow and clunky from a user experience so having a high number there isn’t shocking either. If you click through to the analysis pages for each site you will see that most of these pages are running on sustainable energy already. With the focus from the major public clouds to shift to renewables to power their data centers, I would expect only a few exceptions these days.
Surprises
The outlier here is the MGoBlog site which is a Drupal fan blog for University of Michigan athletics and having such a high number is quite shocking to me. It was flagged as being dirtier than 97% of the web pages they tested! I’ve been using Hey for email the past 8 months or so but still maintaining my Gmail account. I greatly prefer the experience of Hey for most scenarios and being 1/2 the carbon impact of Google, a company that heavily focuses on sustainability, may finally clinch my move to it full time. I’m also surprised at the relatively low impact Social Media sites have in the overall numbers.
27.25g CO2 every morning for a year equates to 9,946.25g of CO2 over a year. Based on the numbers from the EPA’s provides a Greenhouse Gas Equivalency calculator, that is equivalent to burning about 11 pounds of coal and roughly the amount of carbon that 4 trees would absorb in a year. It’s really great to be able to measure this small part of my daily routine and quantify its impact. Now to make some more informed decisions going forward (and plant some trees!).
Update:
Carbon emissions for this specific blog post: 0.63g of CO2
Try out your own sites and routines over at https://www.websitecarbon.com!
#LetsGreenTheWeb
