Re: A request for help - an idea called carbon.txt

The idea of an ethical text file is fine in principle however the authors primary thought of expecting every source along the tree to include their consumption on their own website is unrealistic as at any point, should the chain break; you’re left with potentially inaccurate or missing information. Your text file alone should remain the primary source of any carbon footprint showcasing the tree of output - Just like you would on a privacy report for GDPR (identifying companies who handle data along the route) in a spider map.

Regarding adoption, it might help to build some sort of calculator which identifies how green your environment, staging, code, and hardware are (to both the company and end user), then give it a rating A to F. Like Google does to site performance. That metric along with the “points” of interest (what achievements the site made) could be included in the txt with a link to the score.

It would make it both human readable and more public friendly (plus easier to test against).


On 12 June 2019 at 12:11:54, Niklas Jordan (hello@niklasjordan.com) wrote:

Thanks, Chris! Great idea, I love it. I dont think you need a business case for it. Maybe its more or less a "idealistic" thing... it is the same strategy like humans.txt: https://humanstxt.org/  


‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐  
On Wednesday, 12. June 2019 12:57, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:  

> On 12/06/2019 11:21, Tim Frick wrote:  
>  

> > This is a really interesting idea, Chris. I can see great potential. How  
> > would you propose getting over the hurdle of adoption? People use  
> > robots.txt because they want to somehow influence search engines, which  
> > in turn, ostensibly, improves their results, giving them more (and  
> > better) traffic, which can be used to grow or otherwise somehow improve  
> > their business or organization. There’s an intrinsic business motivation  
> > there. Do you think it is possible to create similar motivation for  
> > carbon.txt?  
>  

> robots.txt is basically a "no trespassing sign". It is one that needs  
> to easily readable, at all entrances to the site, and it is one that  
> achieves an objective that site owners want to achieve, without the need  
> to check the identities of all visitors.  
>  

> People who don't know about it are unlikely to be concerned about crawlers.  
>  

> carbon.txt is more like one of the proliferating number of legal notices  
> that are needed on web sites: modern slavery statements, privacy  
> policies, terms and condition, and, in the EU, E-commerce directive  
> information. These are generally things that sites would rather not  
> include, so they will be hidden away in parts of the site that people  
> don't look at. I think any legal requirement to provide this  
> information would result in this tactic, rather than a special site  
> resource being used. Although some of these are not required of small  
> business, small businesses often fail to include those that are mandatory.  
>  

> There is quite a lot of work involved in calculating the figures  
> required, and currently I don't think the information needed to so so is  
> available. The costs will only be valid at some particular point in  
> internet, which may not be on the route to all subscribers.  
>  

> Some of the proposal seems to assume the artificial market for  
> electricity that exists in the UK. I don't know if this is implemented  
> in many other countries. An example of the artificiality is that, if  
> every customer chose renewable sources, the intermittent nature of them  
> would mean that there would be many power cuts. Even now it is possible  
> for all the green customers to choose wind power, and on a calm day  
> there to be no wind generated electricity going into the the network.  
> Basically the market distributes money between different types of  
> supplier but doesn't ensure that the same mix of energy is actually  
> going into the network at any one time; coal power, wind power and  
> nuclear power are indistinguishable once they are in the network.  
>  

> If it is not a legal requirement, only those with a point to make will  
> actually include the information. In the UK we have a Food Hygiene  
> Rating System. Although all food business should be rated, you will  
> generally never find people with low ratings displaying theirs, whilst  
> those with the top too ratings almost always do.