My friend Ricardo and I feel very strongly about climate change, so we've built a service that makes websites carbon neutral. To get an idea of the impact of the internet on climate change, if the internet were a country, it would be the 7th most polluting country [1]. If unchecked, one prediction puts the internet at 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 [2]. Our service looks like this:
- You add a script tag to your site
- The script calculates the electricity used
- The greenhouse gas emissions are removed through carbon removal technology
Also work in progress is a way to provide insights to help reduce your website's emissions.
Obviously the web is only one part of the internet emissions equation (the other parts being streaming, large file transfers, computationally-intensive applications, etc), but it's a massively visible part which is what we think can make this worthwhile.
We believe people who work online—developers, content creators, publishers, etc—have a huge influence, and a message like "This website is carbon neutral" could have a knock-on effect and really help push things in the right direction.
In terms of carbon removal providers, we're using services vetted by Stripe and Microsoft. We rely on them because the space is complex and they have very high standards.
Another benefit is that they back novel solutions that have a while go until the costs are affordable enough for global adoption. This is important because the more support these solutions have, the more likely their costs will come down and become easier to scale.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you have any questions, we're both around.
[1] https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com/
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322205565_Assessing...
