Ask HN: Should we maybe add header "X-Electricity-Used: 42" to responses?

Telling how much electricity in watt-hours was used for preparing this response.

And it also would sum consumed energy from other requests it made. Or perhaps send it in a separate header.

I don't know where to get this number or if it's even possible.

5 points | by delopsu 1 day ago

9 comments

  • johneth 1 hour ago
    It's an interesting idea, but how would you actually calculate that value? It seems to border on impossible.
  • wmf 1 day ago
    There's a whole mini-industry around carbon accounting but (A) it's very hard to estimate accurately, (B) it will be gamed like any other metric, and (C) energy is good. We should focus on making energy cleaner and cheaper so that people can use it without guilt.
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    • comprev 1 day ago
      "carbon offset" is big business in the aviation world although I feel it's just virtue signalling.

      If they were serious about aiming for "carbon neutral" the plane would never take off in the first place!

      I admit this is a very simplistic view and likely I just don't understand the bigger picture about economics of carbon offsetting.

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      • wmf 18 hours ago
        Aviation is one of the easiest cases because the amount of fuel burned is tracked and ~100% of the carbon in the fuel becomes CO2. Since there's currently no good alternative to hydrocarbon fuel, it's also a good case for biofuel or carbon capture (not offsets which are mostly fake).
  • cpach 6 hours ago
    IMHO it’s better to bake this information into the price of the resource and then include the externalities for polluting by using a Pigou tax, or as in the EU, with a cap and trade system (EU ETS).

    And that’s probably one of the reasons that you need to pay for using the best version of ChatGPT and similar products.

  • subject4056 1 day ago
    I don't think adding 20 bytes to every response, which are never read in practice, will improve the energy efficiency of the internet. Not to be mean, there's just a lot of stuff in most responses that effectively nothing acts on.
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    • delopsu 1 day ago
      hm, right, it will probably burn more energy, than add sense
  • Bender 1 day ago
    Perhaps I have spent too much time around curious, creative and even devious people but I suspect they would try to see which sites they could jack that number up as high as possible similar to how people share speed test results. If it became popular enough I could see Cloudflare one day doing metrics on this and making blog posts about how much power they saved.
  • ManlyBread 1 day ago
    Automated slacktivism, soon available in your http headers!
  • benoau 1 day ago
    Couldn't even compute this value on most infrastructure.
  • aristofun 1 day ago
    Why, god, why??!
  • bjourne 1 day ago
    no