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

On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 11:26:30PM +0000, Bertrand Martin wrote:
> Possible alternatives:
> 
> * Carbon-Emissions-Scope-2
> * CO2-Emissions-Scope-2
> * CO2-Scope-2
> * Carbon-Scope-2
> * Carbon-S2
> * C02-S2
> 
> It doesn't seem to me that the proposed "Carbon-Emissions-Scope-2" is too
> long, but it's just an opinion. Are there any rules or standard on this?

Quite frankly, seeing that the average response header block size on my
server is 189 bytes, inflating them by 12.7% *just for a header field name*
without even counting the size of the value, for the sake of pretending
to care about energy usage would sound like an oxymoron to me. If I was
an end user seeing this, I would probably try to develop a browser plugin
to flag sites doing this as greenwashers.

That's often the problem: waste a lot of energy to spread a message
claiming we're careful about it, like cities installing big displays
in the street, powered night and day showing messages like "do not
forget to turn off the lights, every effort matters". Please at least
make sure not to replicate such absurd practises. If you emit something,
it must cost almost zero to produce (calculation and emission), certainly
not 12-20% of each response header block!

Also, indicating power usage would be more realistic and accurate than
supposed emissions which have no measurable grounds for most operators.
Use a "uj" header to report micro-joules as an integer for example, then
in the future we could imagine that a site's certificate will contain
extra information such as the site's average energy sources distribution
so that the client can apply a rough estimate if they want to guess how
much this request might use of each source.

Regards,
Willy

Received on Friday, 14 April 2023 03:43:26 UTC