Reduce your website’s environmental impact with a carbon budget
Install an adblocker and then evangelize adblockers to your coworkers, friends, and family.<p>It feels a little weird to be doing math that&#x27;s at this scale. We can debate whether computing power is a significant drive of climate change, and this sets off some greenwashing alarms for me, but I&#x27;m going to take it at face value and say, sure, we should have some conversations about power usage for applications. That being said, using an adblocker is basically just automating all of this article&#x27;s advice -- it&#x27;s reducing the amount of content that loads, reducing the amount of code that executes on each page. It&#x27;s also fundamentally shifting away from the attention economy, removing some &quot;traps&quot; that try to get people to stay longer on websites than necessary.<p>And when you install an adblocker on your phone&#x2F;desktop, these environmental improvements are included on virtually every single page you visit, regardless of what the engineers tried to do. It&#x27;s a quick way to reduce the carbon footprint of <i>all</i> the websites you visit, immediately. And every single consumer can do it, it has basically no individual downsides, it doesn&#x27;t require a personal sacrifice.<p>It feels weird that the top suggestions coming out of all of the sources that the author links to are basically saying &quot;make your website show less unnecessary crud&quot; and &quot;make your website do less unnecessary crud&quot;, but there&#x27;s not an acknowledgement or a reflection that the attention economy is one of the biggest reasons why websites do stuff like this. A call to Google to make things better, when Google&#x27;s entire business model is based around making people look at their phones more and keep their phone screens on longer... it just kind of feels like missing the forest for the trees. You know why Youtube shows animated previews of all of its videos when you hover on them: because it gets people to click on videos more endlessly. Talking about the power consumption of the initial render for React, or whether or not Youtube is using CDNs effectively enough is really kind of ignoring the bigger picture of what the web is and why it works this way.<p>So if you care about this, sure, write more efficient code, whatever. That&#x27;s not <i>bad</i> to do. But if you really want to practically reduce the web&#x27;s carbon footprint, then undermine the attention economy and hasten the collapse of the ad industry, and try very hard to contribute to starting a social movement&#x2F;trend where consumers block ads. Unless you are in charge of something massive, that will have a larger impact than any individual code optimizations you make.<p>I don&#x27;t accuse the author of this at all, I take the author at face value. Outside of the author, we spend a lot of time trying to guilt individuals about systems that are designed to work a certain way, and we are often very hesitant to go beyond guilting individuals and questioning whether the larger systems we&#x27;ve designed should also be asking these questions. It is not individual designers being bad at SEO that are producing the majority on the Internet, it&#x27;s ads. And it is fundamentally impossible to get everyone on board with the idea that websites should statically represent information quickly and then get people off them -- when the business model we have chosen for the Internet relies on eyeballs staying on pages looking at ads for extended periods of time.<p>If we&#x27;re not willing to have that conversation and if we&#x27;re only willing to talk about this stuff in abstract terms, then guilting individual developers about the environmental costs of using React is kinda greenwashing, because I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s React&#x27;s fault that news sites have auto-playing videos and animated ad banners. It feels like organizing the silverware drawer while the house is burning down around you. If this is a pressing issue, then instead of researching the best compression techniques for code bundling, take that same amount of time you would have spent doing that, and instead send your friends illustrated tutorials about how Ublock Origin works, or instructions on how to set up adblockers on their Android phones.<p>You can also consider installing SponsorBlock on Youtube, which will auto-skip sponsor segments and intro segments in videos, which will reduce the amount of time you spend rendering out videos. You can also consider installing NewPipe on Android, which allows you to block recommendations on videos, which is super helpful because you&#x27;ll just flat-out spend less time watching Youtube. NewPipe also has a fork that integrates SponsorBlock.<p>You can teach people how to download music&#x2F;videos from Youtube, which will reduce the amount of power&#x2F;data they stream. There&#x27;s a lot of options here that we could explore from an environmental perspective. They&#x27;re not good for Google, but I don&#x27;t really care about that? I guess what I&#x27;m saying is that if you&#x27;re concerned about power usage for devices, that&#x27;s great, but consider widening the number of potential solutions that you&#x27;re looking at and consider being more willing to look at solutions that are not just nice things that get posted to blogs that engineers at Facebook can feel safe sharing with each other. There are articles being linked from this one that talk about cutting down on &quot;thank you&quot; emails. Like... no, burn the ad industry to the ground or stop wasting my time.