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theCrag.com: Add your voice and help guide the development of the world's largest collaborative rock climbing & bouldering platform
https://www.thecrag.com/
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Ecological footprint of TheCrag #3508

Open Drazhar opened 5 years ago

Drazhar commented 5 years ago

Hey everybody,

just as an suggestion: Would it be expensive to run your server with 100% renewable energy? This could also be used as advertising for theCrag and I would find it pretty cool :)

scd commented 5 years ago

This is in line with my values however it will be way more difficult than you think. We can only do this if our hosting providers offer it.

We use a couple of host providers and we use about a dozen cloud services (for example git Hub where this message is posted).

It looks like our main production servers are already use renewable energy:

https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/?country=us

So the spirit of your suggestion is already done.

I will leave this open for further discussion.

lordyavin commented 5 years ago

Of course I support the idea of thecrag to be as resource and environmentally friendly as possible, but using web services that only serve our pleasure can never be sustainable. I.e. if we really took it seriously, we would have to switch off thecrag and revert to printed guides, a notebook and pen.

So we should not jump on the bandwagon of Greenwashing and refrain from advertising with sustainability.

I recommend the film "The Green Lie".

Drazhar commented 5 years ago

And now you should calculate if it's better to use a pen and paper or a web service which use 100% renewable energy ;)

Of cause it's better to simply stop consuming to protect the environment, but it's also better to consume stuff which is produced with renewable energy compared to the same stuff produced with energy from coal. IMHO it doesn't make sense to say, that we can't make it perfect, so we don't do anything. Better to try to do the best we can :-)

Edit: As far as I know the biggest problem of Greenwashing is, that companies spend more money and time on saying that they are environment friendly than being environment friendly. My suggestion is to simply use renewable energy by the server specifically for TheCrag and simply put a little mark somewhere like "Powered by renewable energy". It doesn't have to state that every part of TheCrag is environment friendly ;)