- cross-posted to:
- technology@slrpnk.net
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Marketing bullshit that appeals to some low-information, vibes-based liberals.
Greenwashing for profit.
Pretty much. Being liberal myself, it drives me insane seeing the absolute triple people will buy into. Websites aren’t the things to target, let’s look at things like cruise ships and transitioning to renewable energy.
Implying they’re not all vibes-based liberals. (try avoid using low-information due to its ties with the racist dogwhistle “low-information voter”)
I’ve never seen low-information voter used as a racist dog whistle, at least not when it was first used during the Obama years. Has it been used differently since?
UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, 2012: Dumb and dumber: The ‘low-information’ voter:As the U.S. presidential campaign heats up, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are piling up money and shoring up their political bases. But they’re also going after a few million voters in a handful of swing states — voters considered critical to winning the election. And within this bloc of voters is a special camp: “low-information voters,” or LIVs, a term that keeps popping up in magazines and political blogs.
The term is mainly used by liberals to refer to those who vote conservative against their interests and the best interests of the nation. It assumes they vote that way because they lack sufficient information about issues. The assumption being, of course, that if only they had the real facts, they would vote differently — for both their own best interests and those of the nation.
The problem is that, as neutral as the term “low-information voters” may sound, it’s pejorative and used to express frustration with these voters, who (we’re told) act against their own best interests. Liberals tend to attribute the problem in large part to conscious Republican efforts at misinformation — say, on Fox News or talk radio — and in part to faulty information gleaned from friends, family and random sources.
to refer to those who vote conservative against their interests
They mean black people who don’t vote for them. That’s why it’s a dogwhistle. It became a lot more clear what they meant by that during the 2016 presidential election between Clinton and Trump. The implication being that the reason they weren’t voting for them was because they were intellectually inferior, and not because they were making a conscious and willing decision to not vote for a neoliberal hag.
I mean you’re probably not murdering anyone by using it, just wanted to tip you off of its problematic connotations.
Good to know, thanks.
Greenwashing, can’t believe this even is a question
Plus, it ignores that most websites couldn’t reliably tell you how much carbon emissions they’d be responsible for individually. That’s a super-complicated question to answer.
Part of the issue is that electricity is fungible. If I consume one watt-hour from my grid, I don’t get to decide where it comes from. The mix of generation is the same for everyone on that grid. Even if you segregate the grids in order to vaguely guarantee that you are only consuming green sources, you’re also making the “dirty” grid cheaper and thus easier for everyone else to use, and there are plenty of ways of capitalizing on that difference that nullifies the segregation. It’s a bit like arbitrage.
A website managed by a person working from home are way greener than a website managed from an office, I hope they include that in their green certification
How so?
I mean you put it as a generic thing which means it’s independent of other details, including a “way” so you suggest it’s a significant difference clearly. This must be based on detailed data or research, right? Care to share that?
Because otherwise, I have a few questions:
- Is the whole supply chain included? Developer, Ops, Admin, Data Center, cabling, everything? Or just the legally mentioned admin on the page, respectively the lawyer?
- What if the page from home (and the whole home!) is running on hardware that gets electricity from fossil fuels + cooks with gas while the office and it’s page all run on renewables?
- What if the page deployed from home is written extremely ineffective, so it uses multiple times more electricity?
- What if the office in question is the back office of a pet shop? Or a supermarket? Or a DIY superstore? They’d heat the place either way, so why not also deploy the website from there?
And don’t get me wrong, I’m a staunch supporter of closing down offices as possible. But generalizations such as these help no one, and also just like the OP completely miss the point of talking about carbin emissions and climate impacts.
I don’t think anything could outweigh the carbon emissions of having to drive to the office.
Yeah but that’s making the assumption that someone drives to the office.
And also immediately points the finger at car-based single-person traffic, not office-based work. And I want offices closed down as possible, so please keep the finger on them. 😛
Single car traffic is sadly intertwined with working-on-location where I live
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So you have two identical websites, down to the cable materials, distance of workers and everything else. Basically a 1 to 1 clone. One website has one person not going to office to manage the site, the other website does not. Even if that person is only WFH one day a year compared to the other that is two trips not driven.
Many people here in Sweden that doesn’t live in a big city has quite some distance to work with no viable mass transit options (you are no longer allowed to ride on the school busses where I live which means that the closest bus station is 18 km from me) which requires a car.
Most of our electricity comes from water with other renewables constantly developing, so I don’t think the electricity source would matter much since it’s not server hosting.
Edit: my first post was also in jest while agreeing with it being super complicated with an almost infinite amount of hard to measure variables to boil down to a single digit or letter
Aaaah, yes, if we assume everything else to be equal, then of course having the admin work from home makes a positive impact.
I personally think it’s kind of dumb as hell. I’m not sure how you would know but also websites are a tiny fraction of emissions. If you want to lower emissions it’s much more effective to go for legislation local to you.
So uh. What the fuck does that mean?
Stupid and meaningless.
If I had to take a wild guess giving benefit of the doubt it checks the total bytes downloaded and CPU usage to estimate electricity usage.
With a combination of checking which data centers its hosted out of and if they are using certified renewable energy etc
That tells us almost nothing about a website’s carbon impact. I could serve a 4k uhd movie from my personal website and it wouldn’t even be 1% of the impact from Reddit for 1 second. We need to know how much traffic a site gets for those numbers to matter.
While I understand and agree with you, the obvious counterargument is how many people get serviced and the generated value of them being served. I mean people won’t argue that a car is better than a bus because the car produces less carbon. What I think is the better way to highlight the ridiculousness of those icons, a newspaper website produces more carbon (if energy source is producing carbon) than a server that just return the certification icon. So newspaper website is worse? That is how this certification works… Low information density gets rewarded. Which is contra productive if the goal is an energy efficient web.
To be fair, the service in the screenshot, tries to estimate the average carbon over the year and collects data to improve estimated that counter some of my critic, but it doesn’t fix the ignorance to the kind of data provided and rewards low data density to some degree
If this encourages light, fast loading pages, I’m all for it.
The future is no JavaScript!!
I wish.
Lies are good if I like one of the outcomes they promote!
It was kind of a joke response.
What the hell is a green website
https://www.vandelaydesign.com/green-websites/
Those are green websites /s
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Correct, expect more carbon footprint crap in the future.
My website is running off of spare resources on my 10w router, and yet my 30w monitor that I’ve been using for 10+ years still says that I’ve saved exactly 0.0 trees every time I turn it on. Thank you, now please fuck off with that bullshit.
Whatever it is, it’s a joke. Things like this just take the focus off the people actually causing the problem.
Yeah, this goes into the same bin as carbon offset. Just because you had a couple trees planted in one part of the world you should not be allowed to polute the rivers in another part of the world.
Pretty sure taking a single billionaire’s jet out of the sky will make more of a difference than anything these certificates could achieve.
But he pays people who weren’t going to cut down their trees to not cut down their trees so he can have a carbon neutral jet!
(The above sentence is an example of sarcasm.)
I wish he would pay me not to cut down my trees.
Is it too difficult to post some context?
This appears to be the calculator: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
And it only appears to check the size of downloaded assets and then whether the hosting provider is known to use renewables. Indeed not terribly exhaustive or useful.
Same as “carbon footprint” - meaningless greenwashed bullshit there to shift focus away from those responsible, and the true scale of the damage they’re causing for money.
If anything - seeing that kind of certification would make me actively avoid a company because you know they’re at best using it to virtue signal for profits, at worst and more likely, they’re using it to cover up much much worse shit they’re doing.
Out of curiosity I’ve let it rate Low<-Tech Magazine, a website run on an ARM SBC powered exclusively with off-grid solar power, and that only achieves 87% / A.
Eheh nice one to test! If there’s a 100% it should be that one
It’s completely negligible compared to industrial manufacturing, bitcoin mining, waste, etc.
Make a lighter website because no one gives a shit about a heavy one.
I recently saw it reported that Crypto was 2% of US electric use.
That’s a whole lot of wasted processing, silicon, heat and energy.
If ESG is anything to go by, just a greenwashing fad they’ll drop as soon as it doesn’t have the desired effect
