[Foundation-l] WMF-projects: Carbon neutral/low/aware website?

[Peter Halasz]

To reply to a number of people again

> Of course besides that there is also a
> legal aspect that should be taken into consideration, and that is
> different between these two cases. because dumping chemicals in a
> creek is illegal, and 'dumping CO2' not. [effe iets anders]

Point taken, however... 1. Dumping chemicals has not always been
illegal, and is still not illegal everywhere, and 2. dumping CO2 is
becoming illegal -- carbon trading schemes (like Kyoto) already put a
price on "dumping" carbon in most countries by creating a global cap.
It is true, however, that the Unites States has not, as yet, ratified
any such agreement, and dumping of CO2e is very much legal there.

The real place where my analogy breaks down is when we consider the
cleanup strategies. Unlike a creek, the atmosphere is a global
"reservoir", so paying to lessening pollution on the other side of the
world has an equivalent effect (of course not identical) to lessening
pollution you produce yourself.

> There is easy way to be carbon-neutral and still do what we do.
> Nuclear energy. [Domas Mituzas]

As I mentioned before, uranium is not a renewable resource. However,
as we're not trying to debate specific carbon-offsetting methods or
technologies at this point, I will try my best to refrain from
starting a debate about nuclear's environmental, economic, and
proliferation issues.

However, I will say that even if nuclear were to be considered, good
carbon offset schemes will invest in new renewable energy programs,
rather than than simply giving money to established industry.

> It is possible to completely stop dumping
> heavy metals in the local creek. It is not possible to completely stop
> carbon emissions. [Thomas Dalton]

It is possible for the WMF to stop its own carbon emissions: We could
put a wind turbine on the roof, as suggested by GerardM. But more
seriously, we could neutralize our carbon emissions through investment
in renewable energy programs (carbon offsetting).

> offsetting is at best a stall tactic [Thomas Dalton]

The major problem with carbon credits (yes, I'm saying it has a
problem) is that many investments made today will not reduce global
carbon emissions until some time in the future, and AFAIK this is
generally not taken into account (but correct me if I'm wrong). So
there is a delay between the investment and the payoff. For example,
trees planted today may take tens of years to offset the carbon they
were planted to offset. Is this what you mean by "stalling"?

> It becomes necessary to assign a numerical value to the reduction in
> order to determine how much it is cost effective for us to reduce by.
> How do you suggest we do that?
> Should we reduce emissions 10%? 50%? 90%? [Thomas Dalton]

100%. We can reduce our effective carbon emissions to zero. We can
measure the cost effectiveness of engineering an energy efficiency
solution by comparing the cost of implementation to the cost of the
electricity (with carbon offsets) it saves. However, As our
electricity is largely donated, and the workforce is largely
volunteer, attempts to manage the process at such a level would be
misguided. Instead we can simply aim for low hanging fruit: Tim
Starling already suggested some problems to be solved:

> 1. we keep more servers switched on at knams and yaseo than we need
> 2. we make no effort to conserve power during off-peak times, beyond what
> the servers do by default [Tim Starling]

> Dutch also have no such concept as 'landscape' or 'nature'. [Domas Mituzas]

I'm not sure what the discussion of the Netherlands has to do with
anything, but despite their land reclaiming practices and supposed
lack of 'landscape' or 'nature' concepts, they appear to have quite
large remaining forested areas and national parks, especially for a
European nation.

As discussed, to begin with we can ask donors if it's ok to use part
of their contributions to offset our emissions, until such a time as
we become comfortable with budgeting it as a normal expense.

Peter Halasz
[[user:pengo]]