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

Thanks for the feedback folks - it's appreciate your help in tidying up my
thinking.

I had a few questions that I'll try to answer here.


*Adoption - bootstrapping from open data with the Green Web Foundation*

I'm currently working at the Green Web Foundation, and part of my job is to
open source the platform and methodology, but also release open data around
it that we've been collecting over the last 10 years, of which sites use
green power or not (and expose this over APIs
<http://api.thegreenwebfoundation.org/>, or in browser plugins
<https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-green-web/ekiibapogjgmlhlhpoalbppfhhgkcogc>
)

The green web checks currently work by taking a domain, and by doing
lookups to find the ip range or ASN (autonomous system number - which sort
of maps to one or more datacentres), then checking that against a list of
known green providers.

This has taken a long time to set up and maintain, and we have info on
something like 20 million domains already - so we're able to make sample
carbon.txt files in many cases based on info we already have, and use that
info until a domain in the chain has a carbon.txt file of their own with
more up to date info.

This inverts the current process of people needing to get in touch
manually, and we already use checks against domain ownership, for all kinds
of things like confirming SSL, and so on.


*Why bother - make an existing activity easier*

There's no standardised way for companies to share information about how
they're doing even if they are doing the right thing.

Etsy is doing awesome stuff about combining financial and sustainable
reporting each year now
<https://investors.etsy.com/financials/sec-filings/sec-filings-details/default.aspx?FilingId=13261228>,
and following guidelines from Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
<https://www.sasb.org/> in their own SEC filings, enabling meaningful
comparisons amongst companies. But you have to read SEC filings or know the
right page to find. And this is a pain for people in CSR teams or similar,
or anyone trying to make meaningful comparisons between orgs.

Smaller companies like Wholegrain Digital
<https://www.wholegraindigital.com/blog/measuring-your-carbon-footprint/>,
and Mightybytes <https://www.mightybytes.com/sustainability/> are also
doing good work, but again there's no consistent pattern for people who
want find this information.

I know of at least one large Wordpress consultancy that has had large
clients explicitly ask about sustainability policies or info, because they
consider their the providers in their supply chain for calculating their
own emissions.

If you want to take this into account in your sourcing, right now, you
either pay lots of money to a companies like the CDP, or Sustainalytics, or
pay for someone to manually trawl through sites, or maybe WikiRate.
<https://wikirate.org/>

Also, the UK just signed binding legal targets to get to net zero emissions
by 2050. That means in time, anyone selling to government in the UK will
need to be able show how their emissions contribute to an organisation's
own supply chain emissions.


*RECS, REGOs, GvOs and carbon, and the grid.*

We already have multiple markets, if you want to spend money on carbon, or
speed a transition to green energy. As David says, they're artificial, but
that's because pretty much *all energy markets are artificial*, and because
of the way electricity grids work.

This fine, and it's okay to only care about being able to electricity out
the grid when you need it - as long as you're helping transition the grid
to renewables in the long run.

Many, many electric markets, including the US, Australia, Canada, all the
EU, have mechanisms to incentivise investment in renewable energy - you can
see just how many markets there are here, at energy origins
<http://energyorigins.net/>, and that's before you consider other carbon
offsets (many people have valid reasons for not liking them).


*Building into other tools*

So, some of these ideas came about after I was hacking on a plugin for
Lighthouse (a web performance optimization tool from Google), which we were
calling Greenhouse (geddit?)
<https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/greenhouse>. There's a reason
we're only talking about whether energy is green or not, rather than
calculating specific carbon figures, as you'd need much more info to get
that, even if some of the data exists in places like Electricity Map
<https://www.electricitymap.org/>

In the Green Web Foundation, we already have an API, the open source code
is her <https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/thegreenwebfoundation>, to
see how it works and it would make sense to implement checking for
carbon.txt data there.

There's also a script in that repo that basically works like traceroute,
but gives you a map showing the hops from where you run the script to the
destination url  (we're calling it greentrace, but we haven't added the
green or not checking in it, yet, and the code is janky AF right now.).


*Changing the aesthetic around what good is for the web to drive adoption*

I guess the final thing is that I think we have a lot to gain, in terms of
a more diverse web (i.e. more than AWS being the absolute dominant player
in this industry), by making it easier for organisations with smaller
market shares, but better records on transparency and sustainability to
compete on these terms.

I know that in the US alone, Microsoft and Google are generally more
transparent, and more 'green' than AWS (see this whitepaper for more
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eCCb3rgqtQxcRwLdTr0P_hCK_drIZrm1Dpb4dlPeG6M/edit#>),
so companies like them would gain by adopting this in their products, and
we can see the W3C talking about this themselves in their own recently
published principles.
<https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/ethical-web-principles/#principles>

I think it's possible to speak to this people to deliberately change the
aesthetic (you can literally file an issue against the ethical web
principles repo, like I just did
<https://github.com/w3ctag/ethical-web-principles/issues/11>), in the same
way the sustainable web manifesto aims to
<https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com/>, or the Climate Code of Conduct
(working title)
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pLXw1Qw69zeir3bTM3sbUkszy_RKN5qtWuP-jEbl5BU/edit?ts=5cd3049a#>
being worked on aim to as well.

*Trying this out*

If you host sites, and you're interested in trying this out, I'd appreciate
a direct message/email, as I've also been working on a wordpress plugin to
autogenerate these files
<https://github.com/jacklenox/the-green-web-widget/pull/2>, to make it
easier for hosting companies to support, and I'm looking for ways to make
it easier to be companies doing the right thing to be recognised, and I'd
appreciate some input from people who already are taking these steps.

Thanks!

Chris








On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:16 PM Mike Gifford <mike@openconcept.ca> wrote:

> Thanks for posting this Chris.
>
> It’s a fascinating approach.  There’s definitely value in it.
>
> My concern is why should anyone bother?  The humans.txt is interesting.
> Guess that was something that jumped up 4 years ago or so, but where is it
> now:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2u4p41/companies_with_humanstxt/
>
> Many of the links no longer work. Technology changed and the .txt files
> were dropped.  Other than the robots.txt that we all know to look for.
>
> There has to be some motivation.  I’d love to see businesses have to
> submit their CO2 #’s along with their their finances when they submit their
> taxes. Just do it all at once.
>
> But most folks aren’t aware or concerned about the impact of their ICT on
> the CO2.  It’s usually way lower than so many other aspects of a business.
> Not sure how to change that.
>
> There has to be some advantage in having a carbon.txt file. Can’t just be
> because it is cool.
>
> Mike
>
>
> *Mike Gifford*
> Founder & CEO | Drupal 8 Core Accessibility Maintainer
> *OpenConcept Consulting Inc.* | Certified B Corporation
> t. 613.686.6736
> https://openconcept.ca
> Twitter: @mgifford <https://twitter.com/mgifford>
>
> 571 Somerset St. West
> Ottawa, Ontario, K1R 5K1
>
>

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