I’m deeply concerned by the climate crisis and the consequences for all of us and I’m currently trying to find ways as an individual and as the founder of Kirby to play a part in fighting climate change.
It’s not exactly easy to calculate the emissions we produce as a small company with running a website like getkirby.com. There’s a calculator, which tries to provide some rough values: https://www.websitecarbon.com According to that, we emit roughly 2 tons of CO2 each year with the forum and our site. That’s of course just a very rough estimation.
I tried to find a carbon neutral hosting provider, but it’s not very common. There’s a data center in the Netherlands that is almost carbon neutral but there are not many hosting providers that offer carbon neutral VPS hosting.
As a first solution I decided to use https://www.atmosfair.de/en/ to compensate our emissions. We compensate 10 tons of CO2 emissions this year and plan to raise that amount annually.
Atmosfair is well known in Germany for years to invest the money in social and ecological projects world-wide to reduce carbon emissions. While not emitting carbon in the first place is always preferable to compensation, it seems like the right direction for us.
We also plan to switch to carbon neutral hosting as soon as we find a good solution.
Additionally we are supporting all environmental projects, climate activists and Friday for future groups with free licenses. Please get in contact if you need a license: support@getkirby.com
We are also happy to collaborate with any hosting provider and data center that provides carbon neutral or near carbon neutral hosting. If you are part of such a company or you know someone, who’s part of such a company, please let us know.
It’s only a first small step, but we need to start somewhere.
It might be a bit out of place, but since we’re talking about climate change, you might also want to check out Mission Emission. It calculates roughly how much CO2 you produce on your daily commute to work. It guides you in the right direction not as a company, but as an individual.
Given my tendency to travel and even sometimes work on Kirby while traveling, I’m happy to state that I’ve compensate my flights with atmosfair for the past 4-5 years as well.
Let’s be brutally honest. I’m sitting here at a MacBook Air – in a house – with two kids – I’m not a vegetarian – I fly 2-3 times a year – we have a car from 2009, etc. etc. I know that I’m a huge part of this problem.
But that’s the thing. We need to start being aware of our own responsibility and we need to start making changes. Even small changes are better than stagnation.
The changes that we are making for Kirby are not world-changing either. We are not suddenly all committing to be as drastic as Greta Thunberg. But we can try to send out a message and maybe influence a few more people to think about the energy consumption of their websites, to switch to green energy hosting or do a couple performance enhancements that reduce the consumption. We all have to start somewhere and I think it’s also important to realize that we can do quite a lot without having to change everything from one day to another. Many small steps accumulate to big progress over time.
But we can try to send out a message and maybe influence a few more people to think about the energy consumption of their websites, to switch to green energy hosting or do a couple performance enhancements that reduce the consumption.
Well, I didn’t know about energy consumption of websites and green energy hosting until reading this very post.
@bastianallgeier The host I use (https://krystal.co.uk) I picked in large part because they use green technology as a company and the data centre uses 100% renewable energy. I don’t know if they are carbon neutral, but maybe they are. Might be worth having a chat with them to find out the exact details of their green credentials. Their server speed is epic, and the support is really great… and their name starts with a K
I replied on Twitter as well, but according to Hetzner’s website, they use energy from renewable sources to power the servers in its data centers.
I both have a dedicated server, and a few VMs with them. Their prices are sweet, performance of VMs are great, and they have DCs in Germany and Finland.
Thanks for all the hints about green hosting companies. I got a few more recommendations on Twitter yesterday and found a very interesting one in the Netherlands: https://greenhost.nl They are very focused on this issue as a company and the data center they use is designed around the aspect of being as energy efficient as possible.
I would really love to create a hosting list of providers that seem to go the extra mile to be energy efficient in their data centers, use renewable energy and compensate emissions that cannot be avoided (yet).
What’s great in general, is to see that there are multiple options out now that you can use to minimize the footprint of your own sites and most of them don’t seem to come at an extra cost.
I admire all that try to fix the climate change and the wealth of our planet. I think we should all do what we can to do that.
With that said, as long as more and more people are populating the earth, I think we are screwed anyway. We can’t fit an unlimited number of people on this planet.
One solution would be to let someone like Elon Musk build a space elevator to mars. Even if we could do that and terraform that planet, I calculated that we need to send at least 500 people every day to decrease earth population.
Doing what we can to prevent climate change a delay of a disaster, not a solved issue. But I still think that we should do what we can to delay it, because we don’t have that many other options at the table.
Greatly appreciate that Kirby is taking a stand on these issues!
Inspired by the idea of a Digital Climate Strike, I wrote a tiny plugin that is going to temporarily re-route all URLs of my Kirby 3 site to display a placeholder page in support of the global climate strike on 20 September.
Maybe this is of use for somebody? Background story on my blog, code on GitHub. Suggestions/PRs welcome. (I was even wondering would there be interest to maintain a list of “digital climate strikers” using the plugin in the Readme?)
That’s brilliant! Thanks for sharing. I also love the details in your implementation that make the plugin much more sophisticated than the official banner.
Unfortunately the GitHub links 404 for me. Maybe the repo is private?
I think we should all do what we can to do that.