Why Ethical Revolution is Minimal …and Why That Matters.
For its 10th anniversary in 2023 Ethical Revolution went minimal!
Inspired by Jack Lenox and his SustyWP Theme Ethical Revolution removed all of the frilly features in order to offer its service at a fraction of the data usage, reducing its carbon footprint as much as it possibly could.
As Jack had said, “The Internet uses a lot of electricity. For most of the world, producing electricity means the burning of fossil fuels, this in turn means that the Internet’s carbon footprint may have already eclipsed global air travel.”
In fact it was back in 2015 that our carbon emissions from internet usage were said to have matched that of the aviation industry. Since then we’ve continued to use A LOT more data: Median desktop page transfer size increased by 677KB between 2015 and 2019 – An increase of over 50%. Since then we’ve continued to consume more and more and more data. Basically the internet is causing global warming.
With this in mind Ethical Revolution is determined to be one of the websites to buck the trend and use as little data as possible. Hence no videos on the site, no images, no frills. But it does mean super-fast navigation for you the reader and hopefully the distraction-free ride also allows makes it a more tranquil experience.
What’s more Ethical Revolution is 100% powered by renewables (wind, sun and sea) using one of the world’s most efficient data centres.
You might be wondering why Ethical Revolution need go minimal if it is 100% powered by green energy. Surely there’s room for as much bulky data transfer of videos, images and frilly scripts if it’s all done using renewables?
The reason is that our data usage isn’t just down to where the site is hosted and how it is delivered. Every machine that reads the data on Ethical Revolution uses power to download the data (whether it be a reader such as yourself, or one of the many robots that continually scour the internet to help ‘improve’ search engine data among other reasons). The more data to download, the more power used.
So whilst I might be providing you with 100% clean data, if you’re using a machine to download that data which is not powered by 100% renewable energy* then its adding to our carbon emissions.
Ethical Revolution achieves a carbon rating of A+, cleaner than 97% of all web pages globally, producing 0.03g of CO2 every time a page is visited. Before going minimal it would have produced about ten times that amount despite still being cleaner than 70% of the world’s websites.
*If you’re in the UK and don’t get your energy from 100 Energy, Ecotricity, Good Energy or a 100%-renewable, small, community energy coop then you are not genuinely receiving renewable energy despite the greenwashing you may have been sold by your energy supplier. Read more on that here.
Posted on 29 December 2023