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

Hi Lucas,

Good question on chained servers, proxies, and CDN!

HTTP proxies should update the response header:

* If they got the response from their cache: replace value with the CO2 emissions of only fetching the resource from the cache
* Otherwise: update value to add the CO2 emissions of checking the cache

HTTP reverse proxies should update the response header to add the CO2 emissions of their own processing (routing, filtering, etc.)

CDN would work similarly.

Bertrand Martin
sentrysoftware.com<https://sentrysoftware.com/>

From: Lucas Pardue <lucaspardue.24.7@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2023 4:10 PM
To: Bertrand Martin <bertrand@sentrysoftware.com>
Cc: ietf-http-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Introducing a new HTTP response header for Carbon Emissions calculation

Hi Bertrand,



On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 2:26 PM Bertrand Martin <bertrand@sentrysoftware.com<mailto: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.

Have you considered how this might work where there is a chain of servers involved in handling a request? We might think of CDNs in this light but it is also common for servers to sit in front of something like an app server or cache server. Therefore it could benefit this proposal to make it a list of values that can comprise the entire lifecycle of a request/response exchange.

Cheers
Lucas

Thank you!

Bertrand Martin
sentrysoftware.com<http://sentrysoftware.com>