All this got me thinking about the potential for government regulation for the sector as a whole; seemingly unlikely on the face of it (it is not high in the public perception of environmental threats), but nonetheless perhaps essential considering the upward patterns of our web use and consequent power consumption.

Unfortunately however there is one massive problem with this concept, and it is the question of who should pay for the carbon-offsetting or whatever other means is used to reduce the sector's environmental impact. After all, unlike many other companies, the IT sector doesn't have much control over how many users certain sites and services attract. It is nigh on impossible to judge in the early days of a start-up if it will become the next Twitter or Facebook (i.e. massive Carbon footprint from data centres etc), or simply another low-level player (relatively negligible impact - at least individually).

With pressure currently being exerted across many industry sectors to make products more environmentally friendly (from motoring and aviation to supermarkets and food imports) it seems logical that the government consider also those whose carbon-footprint might be less obvious to the non-discerning eye. Many web users are not even aware of the energy they use each time they enter a Google search for example - as a concept it has not quite entered mainstream understanding on a significant scale, but this does not mean it should not be an environmental policy priority.

The problem however is that in order for such policies to be effective they must be constructed and imposed worldwide if they are to be effective - and this is why the issue is not so simple as a quick session in parliament to table a bill. Nonetheless one hopes that some tighter regulation will be at least publically discussed by world leaders to commit web firms to factor carbon offsetting into their business plans. Maybe something like a 2 year grace period could be allowed for new startups in order to accommodate the potentially unpredictable effects of rapid success (or the lack of it) after which the company must be Carbon neutral (including retroactive offsetting)?

It is a tricky problem and one that is only now slowly featuring in everyday blogging and occasionaly mainstream press. This very blog post is a perfect example of the complexity of the issue - who should pay for its environmental impact? Myself as an employee of EtonDigital? Or EtonDigital itself? What about WordPress the CMS which enables the post? ... I'm beginning to see why the issue is often considered too complex for quick and clear news stories...

Dejan Levi

They are providing an alternate search homepage, powered by Google Custom Search, which displays its results using a black background rather than Google's traditional white. As some monitors require less energy to display black pixels than they do for white ones, Blackle hopes to help lower the carbon footprint of our everyday Google use. The folks at Blackle calculate that the site has saved over half a million Watt hours already, since its launch in January 2007, and also done much to raise the profile of green computing.

Despite some controversy regarding the specifics of how this energy is saved; not all monitors use less energy for Blackle - some sizes of LCD monitor actually use more power to display the black pixels (while CRT monitors will consistently save energy), Blackle is providing a valuable service. In reality though its energy saving is not as considerable as Heap Media initially claimed, they are playing an important part in raising awareness and reminding us to factor such concerns into modern web design. Poorly designed pages are not only slower and harder to use, but also require more power (the Wikipedia homepage for example unnecessarily requires 13 images to be fetched over the network each time it is loaded, - as identified by Steve Saunders in his book 'High Performance Websites'). Hardware and software companies are increasingly focused on contributing to a greener computing future, and it is also time for all web developers to accept this aspect of their work as an industry standard component of delivering modern websites. It might not currently be as big an issue as air travel or energy generation in terms of environmental impact, but nonetheless it is crucial that such a modern and forward thinking industry does its part in taking the challenge seriously.

Dejan Levi