Monzo's environmental impact

You forgot to include using the internet and visiting websites like @username1 posted which is also bad :wink:

actually no as the point is by making efficient changes (going car free, having one fewer children) vastly outweighs things like using the internet to view that website by factors of trillions over your lifetime.

Trillions? Have you got some data to support this please?

The data centres, network infrastructure and all the cabling both underground and under the ocean add up to a lot. You should look it up.

All of this is growing at a collosal rate with no sign of slowing down what so ever. It will grow even more with the 5G roll out and the fact that we can transfer even more data quicker too :slight_smile:

I think it depends on what the internet replaces or offsets

in banking that would be the heating of branches, and the transport to and from branch

if you look at social media, does this on occasion replace a car or public transport journey

if you look at online streaming, does this replace the heating of a cinema, energy running projector system etc, and the transport to and from cinema

One of downsides is the ease of online shopping, especially from abroad. The environmental impact of airmailing something of dubious quality from China, vs buying a better item that has been shipped on a container ship is obviously not favoring online

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Exactly :slight_smile: but for someone who signs up to a forum just to preach how others should be doing more to save the environment is wrong. I think they need to take a look at what more they could do themselves first, especially if they immediately dismiss your point as soon as you mentioned it :confused:

If you really cared that much about the environment you’d limit your internet usage to only the essentials. For example, Facebook and Google would be off the list straight away as they practically have an island of datacentres running 24/7 burning through so much energy. This would then go right the way down to non-essentials like signing up on a bank forum which will also contribute albeit much less. Every little helps though :smiley:

Anyway, I’ve said my bit now, I just wanted it adding to the list! I’m going to leave before I upset more environmentalists.

actually i signed up to post on a variety of topics. this topic asked “What more could we be doing?” so i replied to that.

yes and the vast majority is on cloud platforms like aws, azure, cloud platform etc. we know what parts are power hungry (e.g. spinning magnetic drives, gpus for parallel applications/deep learning, and some enterprise multi-thread cpus). a simple vps in a datacentre running on a ssd is a tiny fraction of daily internet-related emissions.

the website you mentioned, https://www.earthdayswitch.org/ is running behind cloudflare on hetzner which uses renewable energy and has one of the best pue scores around 1.2. by using hetzer rather than self hosting they already save 90% of energy usage.

of course we cannot discount the rare earth metals used (and the terrible human and environmental effects from their mining) nor the fact that any power production has collateral effects on environment and biodiversity (which applies to all industries).

here in europe the infrastructure is much better in terms of gCO2 than say australia or the us. we also know that high-co2 applications (e.g. youtube with high storage, gpu and cpu costs due to the storage and video transcoding. so browsing a html/php/apache website like the the one mentioned) is VERY different to running tensorflow through aws or dozens of ffmpeg threads.

there’s about 830m tons of co2 through all itc worldwide (50% devices, 25% each network inrfastructure and datacentres) but the usage follows roughly the 80/20 rule.

so, overall, quickly browsing a website like that is using something of the order of 1-2 gCO2. in comparison, going child free saves 4395 tonnes CO2 (source: The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions - IOPscience). this is a factor of about 4.35 billion so you’re right, nowhere near trillions.

but the point i was making still stands. you can mitigate as much as you want for internet. even if you cut down your internet use and persuade 5 others to completely stop using technology, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to one person on your street having one fewer child. your energy can be much better used educating people about that rather that distracting with concerns about internet carbon footprint.

this argument does not fly as it’s too vague to be meaningful as well as being based on logical fallacies apparent to any philosophy undergrad.

endeavour to have fewer children overall is the suggestion (with the example of the difference that can be made with just one less per family). nobody in their right mind would dream of saying every human on earth stops reproducing immediately and that’s quite a straw man.

that’s precisely my point. it shouldn’t. other measures are far more effective uses of one’s time.

another point i tried to make is that obsessing over the small things is counterproductive. by all means take positive actions of course, but don’t pretend you’ve saving the world with a reuseable coffee cup, a bag for life and throwing away your smartphone.

i’m very aware. that’s why i made a statement about relative emissions.

everything has an energetic cost and pragmatically there’s only so much change people are willing to accept. my point is a matter of focus.

see above.

yes, no argument with not having a smart phone.

electric car is one of the misconceptions i think is most important to make better understood. people thing they are doing their bit by doing this and recycling when even having an electric car an order of magnitude worse than never recycling, washing clothes at 60C, using incandescent bulbs all put together.

so yes it’s a collective effort but there are better and worse things to concentrate on is all i was saying.

back on topic, it might be helpful to know what infrastructure monzo runs on so we can give feedback on their environmental impact. code refactoring won’t make a difference but moving to a greener datacentre can do.

Moving to another data centre is likely a huge effort, especially with the amount of product lock AWS have. A big part of the effort will be regulatory, the data centre needs to have high security (internal and external) standards, access to regulators, robustness etc

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/ Might help with accessing the greenness of aws

And the only criticism on the earth day thing posted is that Monzo haven’t published a policy, rather than any excessively ungreen practices

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