@slightlyoff personally I’m ok with estimating a carbon cost for each byte transmitted. It’s a shallow measurement, yes, but it’s easily measured and a decent starting point.

What we really need is device energy usage, but Mozilla’s efforts seem to have stalled a long time ago

@slightlyoff agree, there must be some resemblance of reality prior to publishing

On the other hand, metrics evolve and when it comes to energy/sustainability we’ve currently got sweet bugger all. Runtime energy usage required yesterday!

@benschwarz Look, I've actually *done* the back-of-the-napkin on client-side web energy use. It's not nothing, and growing faster than I'd like (thanks, JS!), but it's also:

- low-ish (< 0.25% of total societal power use)
- getting decarbonized with the grid
- significantly less than, e.g., Bitcoin for infinitely more value

See also: http://energyliteracy.com/

@benschwarz The confounding factor is substitution: what fraction of web use is in lieu of some other sort of computer program that would have done the same thing in a different way?

*Gross* contributions for web-based power largely have to do with data center use, and that's getting tackled orthogonally.

Using a different HTML element (per this paper) is *non sequitur* and a missallocation of engineering time.

Worse, when this is falsified, arguments built on it will wash away too.

@benschwarz Intellectual honestly doesn't matter if all we're trying to do is to perform values.

But living them requires more of us.