It might sound very anti-intuitive that you doing a google search about carbon emissions in the atmosphere can actually release a tiny amount of carbon too. It might be negligible but when we sum it all up, in processing almost 3.5 billion searches a day, the world’s most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet’s carbon footprint. Now that’s a big part in the Carbon emission and can’t be neglected.
Digital Carbon Footprint
The face of Digital world has changed massively and the generation, processing and consumption of data has scaled up exponentially in the last decade. But what we miss under the picture is the load on the massive hardwares and their processing power.
The kind of speed with which these servers process data and the energy consumption required to keep these systems cool is massive. Now you can imagine the amount of carbon footprint created with such energy, because high powers rely on fossil fuels.
Google’s net energy consumption in a year is about 12.5 Terawatt, where Bitcoin mining accounts to more than 10times, 130 Terawatt per year. It is found that training certain Machine Learning models accounts to release of carbon equal to that of 5 cars in their lifetime.
What can we do?
From the coding perspective:
• Use efficient Algorithm: An efficient algorithm can minimize the CPU consumption and in result reduce energy consumption.
• Event based over Rest based: Prefer using Event driven architectures because Rest architectures use unending loops waiting to receive instructions.
• Fonts: Even using optimal fonts reduces file size to a large scale. Fonts like WOFF reduces file size upto 97%.
From electronics user perspective:
• Emails: One email sent releases about 4g of Carbon. Globally each individual accounts for about 136kg of C02 in a year. So we can reduce email transactions by unsubscribing to unwanted websites and avoid spams and advertisements.
• Energy Saver modes should be enabled while using any device.
• Online shopping: Online shopping adds up to releasing less carbon compared to driving to store.
The Green Software Foundation is a nonprofit founded by Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft and ThoughtWorks established with the Linux Foundation and the Joint Development Foundation Projects LLC to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and leading practices for building green software.
If you find other ideas to reduce carbon emissions, do mention in the comment section.
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