There was actually a really interesting TPAC session a few years ago that explored how the W3C could help sustainability efforts. There's a lot to consider here: hardware production (e.g. e-waste), server vs client energy usage, network costs, etc. youtube.com/watch?v=o8avSFOuT8…

There's now also a Sustainable Web Design Community Group that's put out a set of guidelines, which mostly read to me as sensible best practices around UX design, performance, and accessibility: w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-g…

WebPerfWG TPAC meetings 2022 09 16 - Sustainability and WebPerf

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^YouTube

At heart I'm basically a degrowther who thinks the only reasonable solution to the climate crisis, species collapse, pollution, and all the rest is to dramatically reduce our consumption of the Earth's resources. But I'm also enough of a realist that I don't think we'll go there willingly – I think degrowth will be forced on us.

This is a very emotional topic for a lot of people, so I don't really want to get into it. And I'm hardly an expert; these are just my opinions based on what I've read.

The only reasonable solution is to do whatever we can to invent better tech to solve these problems. Society will not accept degrowth (not until it's far, far too late), and a solution a society won't accept may as well be worthless from a Realpolitik perspective, even if it would solve the problem in theory.

I think we're doing extremely good work on that front. Solar is on an exponential growth curve right now (and we need more people talking about it), so are batteries, and batteries+solar will, sans environmental regulation, solve the energy problem in most places. In places where there's lots of sunlight and no demand for it, think deserts, solar can be used to capture carbon dioxide. That's extremely inefficient energy-wise, but it's not like people will use that sunlight for anything else, so it doesn't even matter. You can even capture it into biofuels afaik, which is another way to produce free energy that can easily be transported to places where solar won't work. There's also some very interesting work being done in making geothermal more economical and available in many, many more places, and that's basically infinite free energy again. Worst case scenario, we'll just let the Chinese build us nuclear reactors, they're doing a lot of that and know how to do it safely, quickly and cheaply, which the western world definitely does not.

The real problems we need to solve are a lot more prosaic. Making sure misguided environmental regulation doesn't slow down the switch from coal to solar (and accelerate the collapse of human civilization) just to save a rare species of frogs is one of them. Incidentally, this is the reason why Texas is building out far more solar than California for example, but this is far from just a US problem. We need to make sure there are no tariffs on Chinese solar, Chinese rare metals, Chinese batteries and Chinese EVs. In parallel, we need to make sure we're building all of those ourselves in the western world, and that there are no misguided regulations solving a small problem but causing a bigger one that prohibit us from doing this. We need to start building out nuclear now, because nuclear takes a long time to build. We might regret this in the future, but better to waste money building something we don't need than to not build it and have to use non-renewables. We have to figure out what to do with existing coal mines (in places where they still exist) and how to close them down as quickly as we can, despite the miners and their labor unions. We need to make sure that the government-associated, monopolist power companies aren't doing anything stupid to slow down the deployment of consumer solar. And when we've done all of that, we should do a carbon tax, to make it more economical for companies to invest in renewables than to stay where they are.