I had a sudden realisation today about the poor environmental credentials of this website. I've seen a few reports recently that have honestly shocked me about the carbon emissions from websites and emails. I guess because it is so cheap, I don't realise the cost on the environment. Today I read an article saying that each item of junk email produces an average of 0.3g of carbon. I don't know how acurate that number is, but I find it truly amazing that something with such a small piece of information can produce enough carbon to actually see.

I've decided to try and make this website and all of it's surrounding activities carbon neutral. I suspect this is not going to be an easy thing to achieve, because the information and tools just are not available to make it a simple fill in a form and make a few payments exercise. Somehow I need to work out, for each activity, be it website views, emails, application releases or just support activities, how much it will cost to do the release. My other problem is that I want to be carbon neutral at the source rather than by mitigating carbon emissions. I feel that this is a little bit more holisitic than simply working out emmisions and then paying to have trees planted that offset the emmisions.

This is not going to be an easy problem to deal with and it certainly is not going to be something that I can complete overnight. I do however want it to be as open as possible so I will openly publish the work I do on this. In the mean time, if anyone has any ideas or useful tools for how to assess carbon emissions from websites or emails please drop me a line and let me know.

Tags: Risk Engine