Cloudflare Claims Migration to Their Services Can Reduce Network CO2 by 78-96%

https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/10/cloudflare-carbon-emissions/

by rbanffy • 3 years ago

12 10 3 years ago

infoq.com

bad_user• 3 years ago

"Monopolies can reduce network CO2"

manxman2• 3 years ago

Monopolies are also incredibly efficient at delivering shareholder value while minimising CO2 release.

And Cloudflare is able to deliver the highest mass surveillance per watt in the industry.

josalhor• 3 years ago

I read that as "big organizations can make significant contributions to reduce CO2 emissions", which makes sense to me.

nvm0n23• 3 years ago

The datacenter and internet revolution has made no observable difference to CO2 levels whatsoever, in fact you can't see signs of any specific events in graphs of CO2:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/climate-change?facet=no...

The rise of China, the internet, nuclear power, green power, the growth of air travel, the endless global conferences. There just aren't any inflections in that graph to link to human decisions.

Every company in the world could switch off its networking equipment tomorrow and it'd not make the blindest bit of difference. So this looks like a pretty icky attempt to claim that people have a moral responsibility to give Cloudflare money. Companies should not engage in such marketing.

manxman2• 3 years ago

Agree with you regarding the underlying data and the reality it presents.

Disagree with your view on marketing: companies engage in whatever marketing delivers dollars in revenue and profit to the bottom line.

If people are dumb enough to blindly believe the green bs then companies are dumb enough to take their money.

palata3• 3 years ago

Are you saying that human activity is not related to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or are you saying that the totality of human activity is responsible for a large part of the CO2 increase, and reducing the emissions of one small part won't make a big difference?

I won't address the former which is a ridiculous claim. For the latter, the truth is that we need to reduce emissions everywhere. If there was exactly one sector responsible for the CO2 emissions, it would not be a big problem: we could just stop it. The reason it is a hard problem is that the whole modern human activity is responsible. And changing everything is hard.

So this looks like a pretty icky attempt to claim that people have a moral responsibility to give Cloudflare money.

Agreed here. Greenwashing is greenwashing.

nvm0n23• 3 years ago

I don't think the right interpretation of the CO2 measurement data is obvious or clear tbh. Naively, one would read that graph to mean there has been a constant level of emissions since records began. Concentration in the atmosphere just goes up by the same amount year in, year out. Yet accounting of per-country emissions doesn't show that, it shows huge increases in the rate of emissions over time:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

Which implies, what? I dunno. These two graphs do not reconcile. You could argue several different causes for that.

Cloudflare Claims Migration to Their Services Can Reduce Network CO2 by 78-96%

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