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

This is the response i got from a sustainability consultant friend (Ken
Lunty), with some links to further reading:

Hi Greg, an interesting idea and increasingly more relevant as
organizations commit to disclosing their scope 3 emissions (which are scope
1 &2 emissions in their supply chain) also likely to become more and more
significant with the take up of AI.

In terms of energy mix, I'm not sure the best way but typically country
emissions factors are publicly available. In Australia, this would be in
the National greenhouse accounts methods and factors workbook, which gets
updated every year to account for increased renewables in our grid

Electricity emissions are broken down to the state level.

don't know much about the IT sector but
boundary of the service would be the more challenging piece and this would
tie into a consistent methodology for everyone.

Some resources would be the GHG protocol website but probably more
specifically, I would havea look at the Environdec website.
https://www.environdec. com/home

This provide environmental declarations for many products and services....
we have applied this on building materials for the construction sector but
it can be applied to any product...you will even see tomatos and pasta on
there. It would be interesting to see if it can be applied to a service
such as web hosting. The way it works is that you get the product category
rules (PCR) approved which defines the methodology for all products within
the category for consistency. This is underpinned by the standard for life
cycle assessment. Most importantly it defines the scope and boundary of the
assessment and also the functional unit. For example, for concrete this
would be per m3 or ton....

Things can get more complicated in terms of functional units, for a website
would it be per minute browsed? Or per MB transferred? That's probably more
your area...

As an example, we are using this framework for roads at the moment and the
functional unit is m2/year of design life to account for maintenance.
Forwarded It gets really interesting when people can compare products and
visualize the arbon reduction through choice. Hence as important as the
calculation precision. Attached is an example of what we have done for a
shared user path as part of a major road project

The pavement on the left is the client reference design, the one on the
right is our alternative with 70% lower carbon as it has been designed for
purpose rather than tradition.

So the visualization engages the engineers to innovate...which is the best
part!

Sorry for all the messages, just had a bit of time on the train..I actually
just did a podcast with roads Australia about the above and believe it can
be applied to anything..just requires sustainability professionals to get
out of their ivory tower and work with the people who can make the change...

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ken-lunty-putting-decarbonisation-at-the-centre-of-activity-7051
4385880051 54816-hZOe
?utm_source=share&utm_medium=
member_ios

Looking forward to some great discussion on this!



On Wed, 12 Apr 2023, 04:32 Mark Nottingham, <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:

> <chair hat on>.
>
> A reasonable next step, then, is for folks to identify those with such
> expertise and start a conversation. To make that easier for those who
> aren't subscribed to the list, I've created a tracking issue:
>   https://github.com/httpwg/admin/issues/52
>
>
> --
> Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
>
>