The Unsustainable Internet

I’ve been try­ing to rec­on­cile the envi­ron­men­tal impact of work­ing on the com­put­er and Internet. Hosting this site means I should be accept­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty of the elec­tric­i­ty required to store, trans­mit, and work on it. Correct?

I’m not the only one com­ing to grips with this real­iza­tion. Mozilla recent­ly released a green­house gas base­line. They esti­mate that peo­ple using their brows­er in 2019 amounts to 785,474 met­ric tons of car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent (mtCO2e). That’s equal to the year­ly ener­gy use for 90,639 homes in the United States.

Apple has also made a bold promise to be total­ly car­bon neu­tral by 2030. That includes “the ener­gy used to power our cus­tomers’ devices.” They would not be count­ing the ener­gy my iMac is using right now since it is nine years old. The fine print states, “Apple assumes a three- or four-year peri­od for power use by first own­ers based on the prod­uct type. Product use sce­nar­ios are based on his­tor­i­cal cus­tomer use data for sim­i­lar products.”

Closer to my orig­i­nal thought, Eric Bailey came along and asked, “So you wanna cre­ate an eco-friendly web­site.” His take includ­ed some good per­for­mance improve­ments for min­i­miz­ing impact but still came to the same con­clu­sion I’m run­ning into. Outside of delet­ing your web­site and not par­tic­i­pat­ing in ener­gy use, you’re going to need car­bon cred­its and offsets.

Luckily, there are some resources to help with this process.

• The Website Carbon Calculator can show you a sober­ing esti­mate of your impact.
• The Green Web Foundation can help find eco-friendly hosting.
• There are tons of car­bon off­set com­pa­nies pop­ping up now. I haven’t done enough research to link any. That seems like the next step I need to take to jus­ti­fy this site stay­ing online.