It is actually very hard to measure carbon footprint because there are so many factors to take into account.
I realise people can sign up to X% renewable suppliers, but unless that supplier has dedicated power lines to your premises, you aren’t getting X% renewable power. Most of us get our power from a common grid. Because there is electricity loss in transmission along the wires, the electricity that comes into your premises is mostly likely to be generated by a nearby generator (because that’s less wasteful), which might be 100% dirty coal. Who you pay and who delivers are highly de-coupled in the world of electricity. What you pay for with X% renewable is for increased renewable power somewhere into the grid (which is a good thing, of course, but doesn’t make your personal use carbon-neutral). It’s like owing an electric car; wow, that’s green, isn’t it? But if you recharge from a “dirty” supply of electricity, it’s not green at all, you’ve just swapped petrol for coal. This is why massive server farms are sometimes situated near green power sources, so they can directly use green power and sell their services on that basis. But most servers and most users are supplied by a grid, which in most countries are not very green at all. The other thing that has to be considered is the embedded carbon costs of anything manufactured. A lot of “green-in-use” things are not “green-in-manufacture”. Which leads to a number of ironies. When someone knocks down an old building to build a new “10-star green rated” (or similar claims) building, actually most cradle-to-grave studies will suggest that it is more “green” to refurbish the existing building because of carbon costs associated with the constructions and embedded in the building materials used in the construction and in the demolition and disposal of the original building. However, people (owners, architects, construction companies, city planners) want to build new buildings and not refurb old ones, so we choose to overlook embedded carbon costs in favour of operational carbon costs. We have the same situation with our existing non-green power plants, there is a huge embedded cost in replacing them with a green power plant so we are probably “greener” to continue to use them for their effective working life than to replace them, as contradictory as it sounds. In relation to Wikipedia, you could turn the question around and ask “how much less carbon would be produced if Wikipedia didn’t exist”, which is a different question again because it asks how would we live our lives differently. If there was no Wikipedia, would its staff, readers and contributors all spend more time growing organic vegetables in their own backyards or would they spend their time on Facebook and YouTube or … instead? If Wikipedia didn’t exist and all people did instead was spend the same amount of time Googling and reading web pages, arguably there is no carbon cost to Wikipedia as we would have the same embedded and operational costs in alternative activities. For something like the Internet, we probably should ask the cost of it as a whole because the specifics of what people actually do on the Internet probably doesn’t make a great difference (view porn, watch cat videos, sway the presidential election), it’s all just bits down the wire between a bunch of computers and that’s where the carbon costs are. Kerry, feeling a bit nihilistic today From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of john cummings Sent: Friday, 13 January 2017 12:22 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Global footprint for carbon This is super interesting, I wish I knew more about renewable energy suppliers in the US so I could offer something constructive, in the UK you can simply switch your energy supplier to a 100% renewables company e.g Ecotricity and your web hosting company that uses the same. On 12 January 2017 at 14:34, Federico Leva (Nemo) <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Gerard Meijssen, 12/01/2017 07:48: Has anyone ever calculated what the footprint of Wikipedia is in terms of the production of carbondioxide? WMF is no longer as transparent as it used to be about which servers are used etc., but someone tried some calculations: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Environmental_impact#Calculating_Wikimedia.27s_energy_use Nemo _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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