How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web more energy efficient?

Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by mac01021 on Friday September 18, 2020 @03:51AM (#24514083)

There are very reasonable legislative proposals for a carbon tax (most preferably a "fee-and-dividend" [1]) which apply border adjustments to imported goods based on their carbon footprint.

This prevents the tax from simply causing the production of the goods to move overseas, and also encourages your country's trade partners to adopt a carbon tax themselves (so they'll be exempt from the carbon tariff).

Such a policy is not attempting to distort the market so much as simply price in an externality that is currently causing the market to perform poorly. It says simply that, while I am still allowed to hop on a 3000-mile flight to visit San Fransisco for the weekend, I need to compensate you and your family (and everyone else in the country) for the associated damages.

On the other hand, because human civilization is so complex, outright bans and strict regulations on emissive activity are inevitably going to be ham-handed and will either be ineffectual or else too onerous to be politically viable in a democracy.

[1] https://energyinnovationact.org/

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Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by edflsafoiewq on Friday September 18, 2020 @06:25AM (#24515010)

> apply border adjustments to imported goods based on their carbon footprint

The original question was how to find out the carbon footprint of goods.

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Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by mac01021 on Friday September 18, 2020 @10:59AM (#24517601)

That is true. But finding out those numbers is a much bigger problem for you or I than it is for a national government that can dedicate full-time research staff to producing sensible estimates.

So a benefit of this policy is that environmentally conscious private citizens no longer need to feebly grapple with such questions. You and I just optimize for personal expense and our own happiness while computing the carbon footprints of various things is the responsibility of institutions that actually have the resources to do it.

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Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by redisman on Friday September 18, 2020 @11:25AM (#24517963)

If a company is trying to obfuscate you could just have a high base rate you apply to them until they pass an audit to prove that they have an actually low footprint.

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