Key Points
- Internet and Communications Technologies have an environmental cost that is growing due to new technologies (AI, Blockchain, etc.)
- Software enables savings in other sectors, but it needs to do so sustainably
- As a web dev, you can make the Web more sustainable by:
- building only what’s needed, delete what’s no longer needed
- using green hosts and cloud providers
- shipping less code – and making sure what you ship is minified, compressed, performant and accessible
- building software that is “green by default”
- caching where possible
- lazy-loading what’s not immediately needed
- using façades instead of widgets
- optimizing media and images
- relying on HTML standards instead of JavaScript frameworks and libraries
- establishing performance budgets
- There is no current standard way to measure web carbon. But the open-source Impact Framework seems like the best way going forward, as it allows for data transparency, different models, and is system-agnostic.
- Use developer tools in browsers to spot processes that consume too much energy:
- loading too much (inefficient) Javascript
- memory leaks
- heavy use of animations
Additional Resources
ICT as part of the climate problem and climate solutions
- Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector, ourworldindata.org
- “The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulations” (2021) by Charlotte Freitag, Mike Berners-Lee, et al.
- “The Scientists Watching Their Life’s Work Disappear”, New York Times, Oct. 26, 2023
- The Jevons Paradox, Wikipedia
- The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
- California’s SB 253, the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (CCDAA)
- Page weight report on HTTP Archive
- World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovern, 2020. Read my book review.
- “Alphabet just banked $3.0 billion by stretching the life of its servers” by Simon Sharwood on The Register (Jan. 31, 2024)
Making the Web more sustainable
- Web Sustainability Guidelines, a W3C Community Draft Report
- An overview of the Web Sustainability Guidelines with the highest impact and lowest-medium effort
- “Playing offense with green tech to achieve net-zero emissions”, McKinsey Digital, Dec. 8, 2022
- “Green by Default” blogpost by Brian Louis Ramirez
- Sustainable Web Design
Measuring impact
- Building Green Software (2024, preview) by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, Sara Bergman
- “Why do estimates for internet energy consumption vary so drastically?” by Tom Greenwood
- “Calculating Digital Emissions” on sustainablewebdesign.org
- Cloud Carbon Footprint tool for measuring cloud emissions
- “Methodologies for calculating website carbon” explainer by The Green Web Foundation
- “Why We Don’t Report Website Carbon Emissions” blogpost by DebugBear (Oct. 31, 2023)
- “Why web perf tools should be reporting website carbon emissions” by Fershad Irani (Dec. 5, 2023)
- “All models are wrong” on Wikipedia; visited on 2024-01-29
- Impact Framework by the Green Software Foundation
- Measuring carbon footprint across systems is hard. Start with the basics, focus on high-impact activities, and add more granular data where possible.
Optimizing
- Prototype 1 MB image file vs. 1 MB of JavaScript
- “Tools and debug” on web.dev
- Chrome Developer Tools
- “Analyze runtime performance”, Chrome for Developers
- Firefox Power Profiler
- Setup in browser: profiler.firefox.com
- Firefox Source Docs
- “Power profiling with the Firefox Profiler”, talk by Florian Quèze at FOSDEM 2023
- Safari Web Inspector
Where to go from here
- Courses
- Green Software Practitioner by the Green Software Foundation (free)
- Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131) by The Linux Foundation (free)
- Tech workers interested in using their skills to take climate action should join ClimateAction.Tech
- Listen to The Green Web Foundation’s excellent Environment Variables and Gaël Duez’s Green IO podcast to stay up-to-date about what’s happening in green software
- Follow these organizations on social media for news and upcoming conferences or meetups: