HN a Green Certified Site?

I have noticed a few times that when I open many comments at HN in new tabs, they blink. This tells me they are auto refreshing or making some sort of http call to another site.

I don't like when sites do this. It makes me paranoid and wonder why does this fairly static page need to make multiple requests over time to the web?

So I investigated and went first to the source and found a script tag to co2stats.com. I looked at the source for the script and found this:

   setInterval("co2stats_upd()",300000);

co2stats_upd reloads an image with some parameters to do tracking, or whatever else.

Is this really greener? Can the institution of another system with webservers and a data center really make HN greener? Wouldn't it be greener to not automatically refresh data coming from another server?

All I can wonder is, "Is this for real?"