Re: How many emissions in a GB?

Hi Zoe, all,

It's very interesting, but that's not LCA work.

To assess environmental impacts it is compulsory to work with several env.
KPIs in a life cycle way. That's why LCA is mandatory. GHG Protocol and
other "climate" methodologies are not sufficient to obtain a global
vision. There
is a significant risk of impact transfer when working only with 1 impact
dimension.

Best,
Fred





Le jeu. 8 sept. 2022 à 17:10, Zoe (Maria) Lopez-Latorre <
marialzlatorre@google.com> a écrit :

> Hi Ismael, Frédéric, and the rest of SustyWeb,
>
> Thank you so much for sharing this, and thanks Frédéric for the added
> comments onto the thread. This is really helpful and I hope it only sheds
> light into what could become the KPI or methodology moving forward to gauge
> the impact of websites onto the environment. I've been meaning to
> contribute for a while but several things got in the way, so apologies for
> the delay (and not sending some resources earlier to some of you!).
>
> I mentioned it on our first meeting, I also attempted in the past to
> evaluate the state of the art in Q3 2021 of the different calculators and
> what their limitations could be wrt offering a reliable, accurate, and
> helpful KPI for developers, as I was always quite surprised that the only
> factor considered for a website's carbon footprint was the data transferred
> over the wire.
>
>    - Here's the document with 2021 state of the art surface analysis on
>    Web carbon footprint measurement
>    <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F_dHlIaw76qTGYpC2_D-L1RnBnHjQzP_nN8L6Ncz4HU/edit?resourcekey=0-mFte36dWgl_qjisTaNaUrg>
>    (*very* outdated at the moment!).
>
> I'm not a sustainability expert, so my approach has always been married to
> the synergy between web (and mobile) performance and sustainability, and
> being able to offer actionable advice. It feels like the approach of
> current calculators don't have a holistic approach (e.g. not including the
> end user's device into consideration, or the user's behaviour on the site),
> and are considering scalar values for factors that might have more of an
> impact (e.g. backend). There's also advice offered that it's not even
> directly quantifiable as impactful with those methods (e.g. javascript or
> animation optimisation for browser energy consumption reduction, or dark
> mode).
>
> With the help of the folks at Ryte <https://en.ryte.com/>, who also have their
> own sustainability methodology
> <https://en.ryte.com/platform/sustainability/>, we're trying to run a
> benchmark of existing calculators and compare it with a baseline offered by
> the carbon footprint measurement service
> <https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint> that GCP offers (methodology
> docs here <https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint/docs/methodology>).
> Using that as a baseline, with the caveats that it entails, we'd like to
> answer two questions: *how much deviation do the calculators offer vs a
> measurement*, and h*ow much impact do the recommendations that any of us
> advice have on actually reducing carbon footprint*, even if it's just on
> the backend.
>
>    - We'll be running this with the most popular calculators (listed in
>    doc above), happy to share all details publicly for review, and *if
>    anyone has another methodology or calculator, a set of recommendations
>    they'd like us to test, or would like to get involved personally please do
>    let me know*!
>
> Another point of consideration which I believe is also covered by
> Frédéric's comments is that network energy requirements aren't necessarily
> correlated with data transfer. My original understanding towards some of
> the tradeoffs made by current methodologies was that the energy consumption
> on the end user's device was orders of magnitude lower than the energy
> required for the data transfer, but considering that recent research on Electricity
> Consumption of European Telcos
> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358833774_Electricity_Consumption_and_Operational_Carbon_Emissions_of_European_Telecom_Network_Operators/fulltext/622b33ab9f7b32463421fc93/Electricity-Consumption-and-Operational-Carbon-Emissions-of-European-Telecom-Network-Operators.pdf>
> evaluates these factors at a subscription level and not at a transfer
> level, or the fact that on networks such as fixed broadband CPE the energy
> consumption is constant regardless whether there is any actual data
> transfer by empirical measurement, which leads to question current models.
>
> I would love to have a more in-depth conversation on the topic, if
> possible. The lack of a KPI/measurement is one of the biggest obstacles
> when it comes to being able to offer actionable advice or building a
> standard, and any bit of discussion brings it a bit closer to becoming a
> reality.
>
> Best,
> Zoe
>
> P.S.: I try to keep my links as accessibility friendly as possible, but if
> you have any feedback please let me know.
>
> --
> Zoe Lopez-Latorre
> mSites Specialist Engineer @ Google
> marialzlatorre or mariazoe@google.com
>
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 10:01 PM Ismael Velasco <ismaelv.dev@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Salut Frédéric!
>>
>> I've had a chance to look at the excellent work in the repo you shared,
>> and in the Neoctet site (and share it with others!). The French community
>> continues to do fantastic work in this space, and I hope you are able to
>> increase the translations for wider visibility.
>>
>> Reading the comparative study of in person vs virtual meetings was
>> fascinating and counter intuitive in some respects. Bravo.
>>
>> I would definitely be interested in reading any work you can share on
>> your estimations from the LCA of the French site with the parameters you
>> cited.
>>
>> Would also be interested in learning more about how your LCA database
>> differs from the Big Ones that have become mainstream among LCA
>> practitioners.
>>
>> Finally, I wonder how your estimates would account for providers like
>> Google, who claim full carbon neutrality,  and who have introduced, like
>> Cloudflare,  options to use exclusively renewable energy powered zones at
>> any given time.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 22 Aug 2022, 02:43 Frédéric Bordage, <info@greenit.fr> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Ismael,
>>>
>>> Thanks for this try.
>>>
>>> There are several important points to notice.
>>>
>>> 1. No linearity
>>>
>>> Network.
>>> There's no linearity of environmental costs for fixed lines (DSL, fiber)
>>> and HDD. That means that we should better not divide a number of GB
>>> exchanged by the environmental cost of the infrastructure. This is
>>> nonsense.
>>> One the other hand, environmental impacts of 4G / 5G are much more
>>> linear.
>>>
>>> Storage.
>>> Same situation for storage. We should better not divide the
>>> environmental cost of producing and using an hardrive disk (HDD) by its
>>> capacity of storage. This is non linear.
>>> One the other hand, environmental impacts of SSD are much more linear.
>>>
>>>
>>> 2. LCA methodology
>>>
>>> From a methodological perspective, one should better use the Life Cycle
>>> Assessment (LCA approach) which is based on standards (ISO 14040 and ISO
>>> 14044) and is commonly used in most of the world to assess environmental
>>> impacts. In Europe, where I'm based, you must use this methodology to
>>> assess the environmental impact of digital stuff. See
>>> https://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/smgp/ef_methods.htm
>>>
>>>
>>> 3. NegaOctet and EcoIndex
>>> As part of the NegaOctet.org and EcoIndex (see https://github.com/cnumr/)
>>> projects, we already calculated an average environmental cost for a web
>>> page.  The first approach (NegaOctet) is based on an LCA modeling peer
>>> reviewed by a French public research body. The second project is based on
>>> another LCA of one of the top 10 French website.
>>>
>>> Environmental impacts already calculated:
>>> Write, send and read an email
>>> Watch 1 hour of streaming video
>>> Download or upload
>>> Store in the cloud
>>> Set up a webconference
>>> Set up a audioconference
>>> Search for an information
>>>
>>> For each of these functional units, we have several scenarios based on
>>> different parameters. And for each scenario, we provide 29 environmental
>>> impacts - Global Warming Potential, Ionising radiations, Abiotic resources
>>> depletion, Water Usage, etc. - based on international and european
>>> standards (ISO 14040/44, PEF, etc.).
>>>
>>> If it's of interest for the group, I would ask my partners if they allow
>>> me to provide some web environmental impact factors to this working group.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Fred
>>> +33 6 16 95 96 01 <+33%206%2016%2095%2096%2001>
>>> GreenIT,.fr founder
>>> We provide data about the digital world's environmental impacts.
>>>
>>>
>>> Le lun. 22 août 2022 à 01:13, Ismael Velasco <ismaelv.dev@gmail.com> a
>>> écrit :
>>>
>>>> I thought this might be of interest to the community, in terms of the
>>>> need to choose metrics for measuring the carbon impact of the applications
>>>> we design.
>>>>
>>>> https://ismaelvelasco.dev/emissions-in-1gb
>>>>
>>>> I've written a blog that goes into the range of factors involved in
>>>> determining the CO2 emissions of data transmissions.  I've all of these
>>>> referenced in various articles, but haven't come across one that references
>>>> them all in the same place, with tools and strategies for choosing how to
>>>> evaluate and monitor emissions from data.
>>>>
>>>> TLDR: There is no straightforward metric available (possible?), and the
>>>> emissions of 1GB will vary by hardware, software, use case and grid
>>>> intensity. More particularly the emissions will vary by source, device,
>>>> model, signal type, transfer protocol, active software, use case and grid
>>>> energy source at a particular moment.
>>>>
>>>> I give a brief intro to each in my article, and recommend the focus be
>>>> on improvement over exactitude, emission reduction over precision tracking,
>>>> iterating over time to improve and refine metrics.
>>>>
>>>> This would be relevant when it comes to issuing guidelines, or
>>>> integrating emissions tracking into browsers, in dev tools or more
>>>> prominently. Likewise when it comes to green web certification projects.
>>>>
>>>> Appreciate any feedback!
>>>>
>>>