If this is your website, please make the table header sticky, so it stays in view as you scroll down. Having to scroll up to check it is a bit annoying. Also, another column for Firefox (with it's default tracker blocking enabled) would probably be useful.
The advanced metrics page should also have a css media query for screen size; either split the table rows into a list or set a min-width on the table as a whole. On my phone, the first column has only 1-3 characters per line, and other columns seem to only show part of the contents (even the 0 is only half-visible).
If all flights in the world stopped, it would have almost no effect on CO2. It would however bring the world economy to a grinding halt.
We need to focus on interventions that will actually make a difference. Sadly, most of those are through government regulation, which most major economies are unwilling to do.
> It would however bring the world economy to a grinding halt.
I think you overestimate the importance of flights to the world economy. If all flights ended tomorrow, the world economy would chug along and hardly notice. Banning trains, trucks or ships would be devastating to the world economy though.
> We need to focus on interventions that will actually make a difference. Sadly, most of those are through government regulation, which most major economies are unwilling to do.
Both those interventions would actually hurt the world economy.
Let me guess, you take a lot of flights every year? Can't defend flights under the false assumption it'll hurt the world economy and then support "interventions" that will actually hurt the world economy.
All interventions will hurt the economy. If they didn't then they would already be happening as the most efficient use of capital.
But all flights worldwide only account for 2% of all CO2.
Industrial output accounts for 22% and electricity 28%.
If we regulated all electricity to be carbon neutral, that would make electricity cost more and harm the economy, but it would have a huge effect on emissions.
Flying just isn't that important to climate change, but it is quite important to the economy. Not a lot of goods move by air, but people do. A lot of the world depends on tourism. For some countries, it is the main contributor to their GDP.
Yeah, I fly a few times a year, sometimes to the other side of the planet, for business. And also for tourism where I spend a bunch of money buying local goods.
I also use a lot of energy. I pay extra to make sure that energy all comes from carbon neutral sources. That makes a much bigger difference to climate change than using a plane.
People like the above commenter likes to ban flights, because they themselves are unlikely to _need_ flights very often, and so proportionally pay a less price for such a ban (and the positive effects are shared equally across the globe).
Let's see if they propose the same argument if the banning was for driving, or some other form of carbon emission that affects them a lot more (like food, or heating).
This simply isn't true. More people use the NYC metro in one day than people fly in the entire US over an entire year. Comparatively speaking, hardly anyone flies compared to using trains, buses, cars and every other major form of transportation.
> A lot of the world depends on tourism.
No. The world depends on oil, gas, etc. The world depends on transportation of goods. The world depends on manufacturing and production. The world doesn't depend on flights.
> I also use a lot of energy. I pay extra to make sure that energy all comes from carbon neutral sources. That makes a much bigger difference to climate change than using a plane.
No. It makes no difference. Other than allowed privileged people to pat themselves on the back.
I agree with you that flights make up a tiny fraction of overall emissions. But you are completely wrong about the impact of flying on the world economy. Ending flights won't bring the "world economy to a grinding halt." Just like ending flights would have neglible effects on overall emissions, it'll have neglible effects on the world economy. But use whatever rationalization to fly if it helps you sleep at night.
"Aviation’s global economic impact (direct, indirect, induced and catalytic) is estimated at US$ 2,960 billion, equivalent to 8% of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP)."
> is estimated at US$ 2,960 billion, equivalent to 8% of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Doesn't this prove my point? And that's including every conceivable thing possibly related to aviation ( direct, indirect, induced and catalytic ). Not just flights. Not quite, "grind down to a halt" is it?
For the last time, if flights stopped, the world economy isn't going to grind down to a halt. Flights are luxuries more than anything. The world can survive without luxuries. The oil industry, gas industry, international shipping, railroads, trucks, etc can bring the world economy to a grinding halt. Not sure why you are still arguing when objectively, your statement was wrong.
Why not just say instead of "the world economy grinding to a halt", you meant to say "the world economy will be slightly inconvenienced"?
Because of the altitude the emissions are worse than those emitted at sea level.
We have a lot more cars on the road than airplanes in the sky, so reducing their carbon footprint would have a bigger impact. But on an individual basis, flying is one of the most carbon intensive travel options.
However annual carbon footprint of a regular citizen is completely meaningless in the greater scheme of things. Stop shifting the blame onto regular people, we're not going to give up on civilisation just because some monopolies are burning coal and gas.
I'm not, probably the opposite. I'm stating that if you choose to fly a ~5hr flight, you're contributing 11% more carbon than the average person does all year. In other words, by reducing the demand for flying you can have a greater impact on reducing emissions than the average person could.
but if you didn't board that flight, the flight would still happen, and the efficiency just dropped since it carried one less passenger.
Unless you can convince a large amount of passengers to not travel at all (and i meant not travel, rather than switch to a different mode of transport), there is no reducing carbon emissions.
> but if you didn't board that flight, the flight would still happen, and the efficiency just dropped since it carried one less passenger.
At some point, less revenue = less flights. Even dropping demand by 200 people on a route would cause a reduction in flights. It's a long way off from making a huge impact, but individuals can decide how they want to vote with their dollar and every dollar and every reduction counts.
Sure, a huge reduction in carbon emissions will probably come from a technology breakthrough, but we can help accelerate the demand for that tech by reducing demand for current carbon emitting activities.
Ah.. The "tackle the bigger fish first argument" - It's a false one: tackle all the independent paths at once because they are not linked. 2% is huge, its 1/50th of the burden. There are 250 economies worldwide, its larger than several nation states yet nation states are taking action.
You know where I got this? Gen. Groves. During the Manhattan project, asked if they should do one of two choices he said do both. This later paid back when it turned out thermal diffusion could pre enrich the feed for other techniques like the calutron and improve its efficiency.
But there are some actions that can deliver huge gains immediately (e.g., replacing coal plants by almost anything else) for a low cost (both in terms of money and reduced standard of living / reduced growth). Reducing air travel is great, but there are few alternatives and not doing it at all anymore would drastically change modern society.
A carbon tax would make that discussion moot though: It can be adjusted dynamically to follow a defined CO2 reduction schedule, and carbon savings would come from low hanging fruit first, and ultimately affect everything.
You have to weigh multiple costs, though. What's the cost of waiting to find out if the one huge gain is enough, versus the cost of doing them all right now?
It seems like a lot of the small changes with small impacts could actually cause a larger ripple effect which might end up causing the larger changes. Perhaps small changes, once accumulated, could be the key?
Have you come across any lists of what the most carbon emitting things are - on a personal level?
I’m kinda curious what difference different lifestyle choices really make. Eg going vegan for a year vs no flights for a year vs getting green electricity.
"""
Several scientific studies have shown that when people, especially those living in developed countries but more generally including all countries, wish to reduce their carbon footprint, there are a few key "high-impact" actions they can take such as: having one fewer child (58.6 tonnes), living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight (1.6 tonnes), and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tonnes). These differ significantly from much popular advice for "greening" one's lifestyle, which seem to fall mostly into the "low-impact" category.
"""
... although I have seen air travel clearly dominate car use in other sources. Obviously it depends on how you use the car and what type it is.
Also, not having children being so impactful seems to assume that emissions are proportional to population, which seems doubtful to me (haven't looked into the original sources though).
So you might think the best single change I could make would be to stop flying. But the same website quotes $8/ton to offset my carbon footprint. So an even better single change would be to donate $100/year to some initiative to upgrade cooking stoves in Africa, or whatever the current best-value project is.
The Effective Altruism answer is probably to take all the energy you’d put into lifestyle changes, and put it instead into earning money to donate to environment lobbyists, so as to change corporate behavior.
Think of an ad as something like a 1¢ payment from me to the website. Suppose there was no such thing as ads, and the website wanted me to make the 1¢ payment directly. What are our options for doing that? Is there any way to do it without paying fees much larger than 1¢?
If you want ad-supported businesses to go away, invent a convenient way for me to pay Google 1¢. (Convenient as in, I don't need to create an account with a password.) It's extremely difficult, both for technical and legal reasons.
I didn't know anything about the ad industry, but it seems like you may be off by an order of magnitude. Click through rates average 3+%, and it costs around $2.70 per click.[1] That seems to mean an impression is worth in the ballpark of 8-10 cents. Based on my recent web browsing history tonight, I seem to have visited around one page per minute.
So, the problem is not how to create the infrastructure for micropayments, but rather that explicit charges would be very high - the effective cost of browsing the commercial web is about $6/hr, which is about twice what it cost in the mid 90s to use AOL.
I'm not sure of all the implications, but I think this should substantially change a person's views.
Good call... Been thinking about this same system for a while. Give me a cookiejar I can fill with a small amount only from mybank / paypal etc and instead of accepting the flipping cookies, I click a button and throw a couple of cents in the jar of the website. I like what brave is doing, but I want more control over it.
By "break the ad industry" I don't think they meant "make it so you can't inform others that you have a product that you are selling".
Now, the following hypothetical is a rather stupid hypothetical, but imagine if the government made it so that, as part of jury duty, you had to select a couple categories of product, and be presented with a random selection of around 5 descriptions of products in each of those categories (companies could bid to have their product listed I guess) ( the descriptions would have to be straightforward descriptions of the product and optionally some of the ways in which it is demonstrably different from competition),
and also, at the same time, banned banner ads on websites.
This would be stupid and tyrannical, yes, but it seems to me like it would "break the ad industry" while also not really "doing away with capitalism".
To be very very clear : I do not advocate implementing the policy that I just described; I think it would be a very bad policy.
This doesn't break the ad industry at all, it just obfuscates the process. Like, how do you narrow the list of 300 watchmakers down to 5? How does one watchmaker establish a reputation to allow him to be successful that doesn't lead to recreating the ad industry?
The only way to get rid of advertising is to just commoditize everything, which is what communism aims to do.
The selection of the 5 from the 300 is randomly selected for each time each person goes to jury duty. (If it is in a category that few people select, perhaps prioritize options that hasn't been shown to people as often)
So, I don't see the issue with the "narrowing down the list of 300 watchmakers down to 5".
This ensures that some people become aware of the different new products.
If they find any of the products that they see to be remarkable, they might purchase it, and quality can spread by word of mouth.
Also, there could still be people who do reviews of products, they just legally couldn't receive any compensation from the people selling the products.
Given the current environmental state, there should be a big push to shame these websites for wasting energy. Perhaps if this happened on a larger scale we'd see better designs produced that don't rely on highly wasteful and inefficient virtual machines that are mistook for web browsers.
That link was shockingly fast. I was quite surprised by how quickly it loaded - you don't notice any loading time unless you specifically look for it. If only everything would be like that...
I'm not going to jump on the JS hate-train. I develop for the web, I use JS every day. I like JS, I think it's reasonable for websites to use JS. I think most of the people who hate JS are either misinformed or just angry that the web has made programming accessible to a new generation of non-programmers. Fight me.
But all that said, seriously, a lot of current websites don't require JS to function, and if you use an extension like uMatrix, it's trivial to re-enable it on the sites that do.
I have Javascript disabled by default on my personal computer at home. It's not, like, trivial to use -- you will find a lot of broken websites. I wouldn't turn off JS for my parents. But if you're technically inclined, turning JS off is really, honestly not a problem. You just enable it whenever a page doesn't load.
Most news sites I visit work without JS, it will speed up a number of sites dramatically, and (when combined with a few other settings) it can be a huge privacy increase too. It's worth considering, particularly for portable devices like laptops.
Yeah, I use uBlock along with a pi-hole-style dnsmasq blacklist. When I have to use crude unfiltered internet somewhere I'm rudely shocked by how slow it is to render--and horrible, once it does.
I don't think it's entitlement. Many free/ad-supported websites are running on very thin margins and sharing the computational burden with the client is not an unreasonable ask.
It is indeed unreasonable to expect me to waste my battery life to run your tracking scripts so you can stalk me against my wishes and without my consent.
There's the catch. The web developer's intent does not necessarily align with the user's. The developer wants to use Javascript. What does the user want?
The simple example is a website that just delivers information.
The user just wants the information as quickly and easily as possible. She does not care whether Javascript is used to deliver it.
She does care however if the delivery is more resource-intensive and slower.
But if the website requires JS to even load the content, then it doesn't matter what the user's intent is. And it's easy to say "just close the tab" until you really need that content.
This sounds great in theory, but I tried this for a while and got really frustrated at just how often I had to enable JS for a specific site/page because it was broken, sometimes in non-obvious ways (e.g. some interactions work but others rely on JS). For me at least, it wasn't worth it, but YMMV depending on how you use the web and your tolerance for this kind of thing.
Mostly agree with #1, but I don't understand #2. You're saying delivering plain, pre-rendered HTML is too fast for the client, so we shouldn't use it (especially in a thread about energy use on mobile)?
Using JS for partial page updates (whether that's a full single-page app or something smaller) has the potential to consume fewer network resources across multiple interactions.
Has the potential to ... but in practice, no. Websites which do this overwhelmingly use "best practices" frameworks, libraries, packers, minifiers, and up with an extremely dense 1 MiB javascript bundle, while the meaningful html/text of the page is less than 10 KiB. Images are bigger but the need to load / ability to cache is the same in either situation. And be careful that your api responses are not huge json blobs with more information than the page needs ...
Modern webpages use all the latest best techniques, and lose the performance race by miles, over and over again. Nobody is interested or enabled to clean up the mess, just to try to add more big-bang optimizations on top, after we get a few more features which users hate crammed on top ...
The truth is we had the technology for extremely efficient computation 10 years ago. New technology is nice, I like it, but we don't need it. But also, it doesn't matter. Simple gluttony and sloth will overwhelm any efficiency improvements.
1. Actually no, most websites work just fine. I have YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook (I know) whitelisted. Pretty much everything else I use regularly is fantastic.
2. The server doesn’t have to run on a battery small enough to put in my pocket.
Just a guess, but from the preview image the site shows, youtube w/o ublock loads 2 large banners, and one row of videos, vs 3 rows of videos w/ ublock. The larger number of video thumbnails shown may explain the larger size
> For now this test only displays the estimated Watt Hour for transferring the bytes of the web page (source). Data transfer is not all it takes to run ads, there is also data crunching happening on servers and rendering of the ads on clients. This means the estimated Wh could actually be higher, but I need more sources for that. Please email me![0]
Given that the page takes an extra 3 seconds to load with ads, power usage is probably higher in reality. On the data side, if you look at the screenshot for both pages, you'll also notice that the blocker-free Chrome version has a giant white space at the top where a banner should be.
My guess is that the banner hasn't loaded yet, but webtest didn't know to wait for it.
In my own (very, very unscientific) test, I loaded up NYT in Firefox (which has my standard extensions installed) and in a fresh Chrome install. The Chrome install downloaded 2.9 MB for ~170 requests, and my Firefox install downloaded ~240 KB for 17 requests.
I left the both browsers open for about a minute, and an extra .3 MB got downloaded on the Chrome side as part of a tracking ping, so it's not just page load either that's a concern here -- every minute you stay on the page you'll leak more data.
To be clear, the NYT is great at optimizing page load with ads. If anything, I would consider them to be a positive anomaly. But even so, I'm seeing ~80% bandwidth savings over a fresh Chrome install. I suspect my extensions are more aggressive than uBlock Origin is by itself. But the page still loads and works fine for me in Firefox, nothing appears to be broken.
I don't think "ads make people buy stuff they don't need" is a large part of what's going on. One way to think about this would be, what would the world be like if we didn't allow advertising? Not just internet ads, but magazine ads, affiliate links, sponsored posts, product placement, everything. And assume that enforcement is perfect ;)
Here's my speculation about how this would change people's purchasing:
* Products would be a lot stickier. A lot of advertising is about trying to move people between competitors, or keep them from moving. Sometimes it's an explicit "here's a way we're better" (ex: company advertises that they don't charge unpopular fee X), other times it's a more general "you should think positively of our company" (ex: we agree with you on political issue Y).
* Relatedly, it would be much harder to get many new products started. Say a startup makes a new credit card that keeps your purchase history private: right now a straightforward marketing approach would be (a) show that other credit cards are doing something their target audience doesn't like, (b) build on their sense that this isn't ok, and (c) present the new card as a solution. Without ads they would likely still see uptake among people who were aware of the problem and actively looking for a solution, but mostly people would just stick with the well-known companies.
* Purchases of things people hadn't tried before would decrease, both things that people were in retrospect happy to have bought and things they were not. One of the roles of advertising is to let people know about things that, if they knew about them they would want to buy. But "buy stuff they don't need" isn't a great gloss for this, since after buying the products people often like them a lot.
This is just my guesses; I work on the technical side of ads and don't have a great view into their social role, and even if I was in a role like that it would still be very hard to predict how the world would be different with such a large change. Where does your picture differ from mine?"
(For 'saving the planet' I think a carbon tax would make a lot more sense.)
True. And you can address it yourself by blocking JS mainly, and ads, and be amazed at how snappily a web page renders (when it does, which is often but not always sans JS).
