It was as if he had just given himself the power to cancel transatlantic flights, or boost the number of vegetarians in the world. All by deleting a f

The tiny programming tweaks that could slash emissions

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2024-11-28 13:00:07

It was as if he had just given himself the power to cancel transatlantic flights, or boost the number of vegetarians in the world. All by deleting a few lines of code.

In early 2020, programmer Danny van Kooten published an eye-catching blog post. In it, he explained why he had removed some code from a Mailchimp newsletter plugin that he had made for the WordPress blogging platform. At the time, all of his plugins were installed on more than two million websites and the small segment of code in question required 20 kilobytes of data.

After making some broad assumptions about how many people visited those websites, and the carbon intensity of electricity consumed by their computers, he estimated that this small adjustment, if replicated widely, could slash computing-related emissions by the equivalent of 59,000 kilograms of CO2 every month. In principle, over one year, that’s as much as stopping 1,200 people flying from Amsterdam to New York.

The blog post soon went viral. Van Kooten’s was such a tantalising assertion that it has been discussed in many other blogs as well as mainstream media coverage since. And yet, calculations like this are surprisingly rare. Given the many millions of pieces of software running on various machines around the world right now, it is possible that a flurry of minor programming adjustments across many of them would have a significant global impact.

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