Carbon footprint is one of the most talked about buzz words in the present time. And it’s not all about people or organizations embracing the responsibility of estimating their CO2 emissions, coming forward and making it public. And taking oaths of reductions and future “zero” emissions.
No, it’s not just that simple, there is also the Website Carbon Footprint issue. We who are in the business of digital communication can no longer look at our creations and think they are CO2 free. They aren’t… especially if they generate huge amounts of traffic and if they aren’t fully optimized to save as much bandwidth as possible.
This is a new way to look at SEO, this is environmental SEO - pure and simple. Our agencies can take advantage of this by leading the “green Internet” revolution and our clients can differentiate themselves from their competitors for having Eco-friendly websites.
If you want to start measuring your own Blog’s Carbon Footprint today, I strongly advise you to install this widget - It’s real easy and free!
The co2-stats project does not make its methods public, and it is not at all clear that they are correctly calculating the impact of web traffic. Besides the lack of credible methodology, it is also not clear that the founders (who are academics in other fields) know much about the carbon offsets they claim to be buying. They say they are making websites carbon neutral, but they claim to do so by buying renewable energy credits, which are not the same thing as carbon offsets at all. Renewable Energy Credits (or RECs) do not necessarily reduce CO2 emissions the way carbon offsets do, and may not even result in construction of new renewable power plants. If CO2-stats wants to claim to make websites carbon neutral, they would need to use actual carbon offsets.
They also claim to provide “environmental certification” but nowhere do they make clear what it is they are certifying, what their criteria are, how they are evaluated, etc.
In a world where we need to better understand, quantify, and reduce our environmental impacts, we must be on the looking for those looking to greenwash by making us feel good without actually delivering on their claims.