How Can 'Sustainable' Web Design Assist in the Fight Against Climate Change?

To cut the carbon, programmers are cutting the code. Call it green programming.

It's known as "sustainable" software design, and it's driven by technologists who track the energy budget of practically every swipe and click in our digital world. It's a ripe hunting ground. Because software is responsible for so much of our life, even minor tweaks can have a big impact. They can even be beautiful: A group of students created an Instagram filter last spring that decreases the file size of a photo you upload by 40%. It gives the image a retro initialization that looks like a black-and-white newspaper photo from the 1950s. One of the students, Danique de Bies, told me that the goal wasn't just to save energy, but to create something so appealing that people would "want to use it."

Our digital environment is often made more pleasant by recoding it to use less energy. Consider all the ad code that clogs up websites—gigabytes and gigabytes of garbage. We despise it for spying on us, but it also slows down page loading.

"Our wasting habits can pile up. It would save 16 tones of carbon per year if every adult in the UK sent one less "thank you" email per day."

Granted, there's an apparent counter-argument to this design trend: why focus on individuals in the first place? Look to major infrastructure to reach truly tasty carbon reduction targets. Video content providers account for 61% of all online activity. (Netflix alone is responsible for 13% of it.) The annual emissions of Bitcoin are nearly equal to those of Sri Lanka. Consider artificial intelligence. Training a single AI model can produce up to five times the CO2 produced by a car over its lifetime. Did you know that you can blog right from your published website? After you publish your site, go to your website’s URL and login with your Wix account. There you can write and edit posts, manage comments, pin posts and more! Just click on the 3 dot icon ( ⠇) to see all the things you can do.

Even if tiny design changes don't completely eliminate the belching emissions of movies or bitcoin, they're still worth discussing. It's excellent to put a spotlight on our daily software's CO2 footprint since it makes the value of lower-energy code more tangible. Consider what would happen if websites abandoned their monitoring bloatware in favor of badges touting their improved performance and decreased carbon footprint. 

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