Now open an average news site, with 100s of request, tens of ads, autoplaying video ads, tracking pixels, etc., using gigabytes of ram and a lot of cpu.
Then multiply that by the number of daily visitors.
Without "hamburgers" (food in general), we die, reducing the size of usesless content on websites doesn't really hurt anyone.
Now go to an average McDonalds, with hundreds of orders, automatically added value meals, customer rewards, etc. consuming thousands of cows and a lot of pastureland.
Then multiply that by the number of daily customers.
Without web pages (information in general), we return to the Dark Ages. Reducing the number of hamburgers people eat doesn't really hurt anyone.
Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.
You don't need to eat burgers though. You can eat food that consumes a small fraction of energy, calorie, land, and animal input of a burger. And we go to McDonalds because it's a dopamine luxury.
It's just an inconvenient truth for people who only care about the environmental impact of things that don't require a behavior change on their part. And that reveals an insincere, performative, scoldy aspect of their position.
