Re: Introducing a new HTTP response header for Carbon Emissions calculation

Really good idea to get some eco accounting into http.  I've pinged some of
my contacts who do such accounting to see if they can provide some more
detailed use-cases of how it might be used.

I know that headers are often compressed now, but it is still likely to
often be sent in plain text.  So it might be a good idea to save some bytes
with a shorter header: "C-Emmisions-2"

Also, it would be a pity to calculate it and send it if the client was not
expecting it.  We could define some kind of expect or accept header in the
request to indicate that the header should be sent in the response, but
that might just needlessly create more data sent.    Is there a way we
could signal on a connection by connection basis if the client is listening
for such a header?

cheers



On Tue, 11 Apr 2023 at 15:25, Bertrand Martin <bertrand@sentrysoftware.com>
wrote:

> Hi, (newbie here)
>
> I submitted a new I-D to define a simple HTTP response header field with
> the amount of CO2-eq in grams emitted by the processing of the request and
> the production of the response:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-martin-http-carbon-emissions-scope-2/
>
> Example:
> Carbon-Emissions-Scope-2: 0.0000456
>
> The goal:
> If HTTP servers are able to calculate or estimate this value, it will
> allow clients and applications to assess their Scope 3 carbon emissions. It
> is critical that we define a standard header for reporting this metric to
> help organizations assess the carbon emissions associated to the
> consumption of external services, SaaS, or even a Web site, a Google
> search, a ChatGPT response, etc.
>
> Note: We're talking about Scope-2 emissions only (i.e. associated to the
> electricity consumed while performing the service), because you only need
> to take into account the Scope-2 emissions of your suppliers when you
> estimate your own Scope-3 emissions. See
> https://www.iso.org/standard/66453.html  and
> https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards_supporting/FAQ.pdf
> for more information on Scope 1, 2 and 3.
>
> Any chance this would be looked at by the HTTPbis WG? I believe this could
> transform the industry in how it handles carbon emissions.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Bertrand Martin
> sentrysoftware.com
>
>
>
>

-- 
Greg Wilkins <gregw@webtide.com> CTO http://webtide.com