[HN Gopher] Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones
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Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones
Author : ZacnyLos
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-09-14 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (branch.climateaction.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (branch.climateaction.tech)
| slim wrote:
| I installed Lineage os on my phone and now my battery lasts four
| days (it lasted only one day before)
| medv wrote:
| Carbon-live.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I cannot imagine the sheer amount of energy wasted by a whole
| bunch of NPM packages running on my phone...
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe there should be a carbon tax on an app's typical resource
| usage once they have more than a million users.
|
| Microsoft, for example, has how many hundreds of millions of
| Teams users? If anybody has the knowledge and resources to
| build an efficient application, it's Microsoft. But instead, to
| save pennies per user, they build with Electron and waste a
| huge amount of energy.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| In all seriousness - there are already taxes on exactly this
| in many countries, and even the US has considered carbon
| taxes on this.
|
| The big secret? Electricity costs money, and is taxed.
|
| Basically - why fucking bother with trying to measure and
| assess these applications when there are already measurements
| on the root consumption - electric power.
|
| Long story short - it's a pretty useless thing to be focused
| on - it costs well under $5 to charge a smartphone for a
| year's worth of usage. There are simply much, MUCH more
| impactful changes we could be focused on.
|
| This is a waste of time.
| kornhole wrote:
| And how many people have or will have handsets in the near
| future? If it is 3 billion people and we can reduce the
| power consumption by 25%, it would be a lot. Reduction in
| data center usage of power is the other part. $5 a year of
| electricity per phone sounds low, but maybe you can share
| where you got that number?
| systoll wrote:
| $5/year is an extremely high estimate.
|
| A phone with a 5000mAh battery (more than any iPhone)
| takes about 20 watt hours of power to charge.
|
| Charging it from empty to full each day would use about
| 7.3 kWh per year.
|
| Electricity costs about 15c per kWh.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I, too, struggle to imagine "infinitesimal".
| philipkglass wrote:
| The full report is here:
| https://groenlinks.nl/sites/groenlinks/files/2021-09/CE_Delf...
|
| I don't believe their numbers. They say that data use over wi-fi
| consumes 150 watt-hours per gigabyte transferred, or 220 watt-
| hours per gigabyte when including the energy used in data
| centers.
|
| Downloading Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, at 250 GB [1],
| would consume 37.5 to 55 kilowatt hours depending on whether you
| use the lower or upper figures. That's more energy than you need
| to fully charge a Nissan Leaf. Watching 8k video on YouTube can
| transfer up to 22.5 GB per hour [2]. At 220 watt-hours per GB
| transferred that implies 4,950 watts of power -- comparable to
| running a large air conditioner or an electric oven. If data
| transfer really had these huge power demands, you'd see
| electrical brownouts whenever a hot new streaming series debuts.
|
| When I've investigated reports like this before, the flaw of the
| methodology is usually something like:
|
| 1) Take a well-sourced megabits-per-watt study of networking
| equipment that somebody published long ago -- say, in 2003.
|
| 2) Measure today's data consumption.
|
| 3) Multiply the 2022 data consumption number by the 2003 energy
| intensity number. Get a huge result.
|
| Figuring out what happened in step 1 can be difficult because of
| indirect citations. A current paper will cite "Davy, 2018" but
| you look at the Davy references and it's getting numbers from
| "Smith, 2012" while Smith sources from "Chu, 2008" and Chu
| finally references the person who measured it: "Graham, 2003."
|
| [1] https://gamerant.com/pc-games-file-size-hd-space-biggest-
| hug...
|
| [2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-
| youtube-...
| jonas21 wrote:
| Yeah, many things in the report seems a bit off. Like they
| assume everyone uses the same amount of data regardless of what
| kind of network they're on. So since 5% of users are on 2G
| networks, they assume 5% of total data is transferred over 2G
| (which is ~400x less efficient per byte than 5G).
|
| > _The EU average energy consumption of data traffic depends on
| the distribution of mobile networks used for cellular data
| traffic. The Ericsson mobility report also provides information
| on the type of smartphone subscription. This data is summarised
| in Table 3. We make the assumption that the distribution of the
| total data-use over the different mobile networks is the same._
|
| According to their numbers, 2G would account for nearly two
| thirds of total mobile energy use, which probably should've
| made them question their assumptions.
| p1necone wrote:
| There seems to be a lot here that doesn't pass even a cursory
| sniff test. Just thinking about the power consumption of the
| networking equipment involved and doing some quick napkin
| math should have at least made them suspicious of their
| results.
| philipkglass wrote:
| You can spot-check a lot of claims with freshman level
| knowledge of the natural sciences, unit conversion, and
| arithmetic. But this combination of simple, powerful skills
| is less common than I would like.
| Arrath wrote:
| While not reflecting on the carbon footprint, I was surprised to
| see just how many queries from my phone were blocked by PiHole
| once I set it up. Every minute, even when sitting there not being
| used. What an eventual waste of battery, data and processing
| power.
|
| I do wonder how many of those queries may be repetitions upon the
| first one being blocked but even still.
| asdff wrote:
| What really sucks about the more recent ios versions is that
| they make it a little counterintuitive to shut off your radios
| when you don't need them. If you want to actually shut off your
| wifi or blutooth its in your Settings app, the buttons in the
| control center don't actually shut things off.
|
| Sometimes I just throw the device in airplaine mode for a while
| if I am busy or overnight. This is a lot better than low power
| mode; the device just sips power and can probably be on standby
| for a week versus hopefully a day with all the services on the
| device phoning home in the background. I flick it on when I
| have a chance to actually follow up on text or calls, and they
| come in a few seconds after.
| Arrath wrote:
| > What really sucks about the more recent ios versions is
| that they make it a little counterintuitive to shut off your
| radios when you don't need them. If you want to actually shut
| off your wifi or blutooth its in your Settings app, the
| buttons in the control center don't actually shut things off.
|
| This annoys the absolute hell out of me.
|
| > Sometimes I just throw the device in airplaine mode for a
| while if I am busy or overnight.
|
| I have made a habit of doing the same when I'm going
| somewhere remote that doesn't have service, else the phone
| will thrash the battery to death vainly searching for signal.
| kleiba wrote:
| "Unwanted" only by the user.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I also bet that using less performance oriented languages like
| Php, Ruby, Python in the datacenter instead of Rust and C++ also
| has a huge Carbon footprint.
|
| Honestly, the only way forward to really fight climate change is
| to decouple carbon from power generation.
|
| Everything else is just wasting time re-arranging deck chairs on
| the Titanic.
|
| That means we need to be all in on zero emissions power
| generation (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) as well as conversion of
| combustion engines to electric (see electric cars).
| mellavora wrote:
| (see electric cars^h^h^h^hbikes).
|
| There, fixed it for you.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Datacenter energy usage is irrelevant to our global situation.
| A large cloud datacenter uses a similar amount of power as 1
| large aircraft. All U.S. datacenters combined consumed about 1%
| of U.S. electric power, meaning they constitute much less than
| 1% of all energy demand. And despite the fact that cloud
| capacity has exploded in the last 10 years, electric power
| consumption of datacenters has barely increased, because the
| cloud is so dramatically more efficient than other datacenters.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| source? Bitcoin network allegedly uses as much electricity as
| Argentina based on headlines (and... those are headlines).
| Yes that's global, but still.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I'm not sure of the source (as I'm not the parent), but I
| wouldn't classify crypto farms as "datacenters". They have
| very low needs in terms of bandwidth and reliability. Many
| of them are barns on consumer ISP connections filled with
| bare mobos sitting on pieces of cardboard, or other similar
| arrangements that are presumably OK given the economics of
| crypto, but wouldn't be sellable even as cloud compute for
| most purposes in the current market (it might be OK for
| batch-type stuff that doesn't involve tons of transfer --
| some kinds of scientific workloads like Folding@Home
| maybe?).
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| How can all US data centers make up 1% of US electrical power
| and at the same time only use the same amount of energy as 1
| large aircraft?
| dools wrote:
| I wonder if the respondents understood the consequences of
| disabling advertising.
|
| Like was the question "do you want to pay to use Kwazy Kupcakes,
| lose access to Kwazy Kupcakes, or allow Kwazy Kupcakes to show
| you ads?" or was it just "Should Kwazy Kupcakes be allowed to spy
| on you?"
|
| Because I have a hunch it would be far fewer than 60% if they
| understood the consequences of destroying the revenue model of
| their shitty free to play games they use to numb their brains at
| every available opportunity.
| eulgro wrote:
| The website allows you to load images individually by clicking on
| them, it goes well with the title :)
| Syonyk wrote:
| Indeed! I just ran it through the inspector, it only transfers
| 257kb in the initial load! Impressive!
|
| The images are super tight, too.
|
| _Buuut_ , it loads the "Two girls sitting on couch" image even
| though it doesn't display it by default.
| wmf wrote:
| Tax carbon and move on. These (inaccurate) calculations and the
| resulting guilt trips are the real waste of resources.
| lotu wrote:
| They say that this is 3-8 Metric tons of carbon per year. For
| comparison a 747 flying from New York to London one way emits 500
| Metric tons of carbon. Europe is emitting around 2 BILLION Metric
| tons of carbon per year.
|
| I personally don't think this is an effective use of resources if
| our goal is to stop climate change.
| hgomersall wrote:
| They're measuring in Mega Tonnes, not metric tons.
| tines wrote:
| GP needs to fix their comment, it's completely inaccurate and
| presents to people who don't read the article an entirely
| wrong conclusion.
| kornhole wrote:
| I agree that we should focus on the major uses of power, but
| the trajectory of computing and data center usage is
| accelerating quickly. We have the opportunity to get ahead of
| it rather than try to rip out and replace later as we are doing
| with power plants and transportation, all very costly.
| kornhole wrote:
| Another bonus of turning off these advertising activities on
| phones and networks is that people are not as manipulated into
| buying more crap they don't need. Mass consumerism is a major
| cause of CO2 production.
| [deleted]
| kornhole wrote:
| My friends are surprised when I show them my little raspberry PI
| on which I have running two social media instances, two search
| engines, Nextcloud, XMPP, email and some other services for a
| dozen people. I explain that my services don't have any
| advertising, blockchain, surveillance, or data mining which
| massively reduces the amount of resources needed. We are all in
| the same town which shortens the data transfers. My phone also
| stays powered for days since it is using primarily my local
| services and no Goopple. This is a secure, private, and lower
| carbon solution I hope more people employ.
| Le_Dook wrote:
| Do you have any write-up about your setup? I've been interested
| for a while in self hosting myself at home, but things like
| security and such are quite confusing and conflicting at times,
| I find.
| kornhole wrote:
| Here is a guide I hope helps get you started:
| https://growyourown.services/ I am using
| https://yunohost.org, but https://pibox.io/ looks like a cool
| setup that takes care of some of the more difficult things
| such as tunneling and backups.
| xnx wrote:
| This reminds me of the obscure campaign to change the Google
| homepage background to black to save electricity. There are much
| higher value things to spend our time and attention on.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Black is a high power state for LCDs.
| always2slow wrote:
| Not for OLEDs. I just tested my LG C1, 64 watt difference
| between full screen black #0000000 and full screen white
| #FFFFFF at 120hz
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| What was the difference?
| always2slow wrote:
| 64 watts?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| It's not the biggest waste in the world, but it's a
| particularly galling one. "You want to spy on me, use my data
| cap, use my battery, and generate CO2? No thanks."
| Tycho wrote:
| My work MacBook Pro had been running hot for months. Whenever I
| check the app power consumption it would list Chrome, but I felt
| that was to be expected. Eventually I got curious and looked at
| the Task Manager within Chrome to see which of the many tabs was
| actually using a lot of CPU/memory/energy. Turns out this niche
| Scottish ancestry website, with a mostly-text layout and a 1990s
| advertising banner was hogging almost an entire core, constantly,
| in the background. And this had been going on for months!
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Every web developer and designer should be forced to experience
| their site on a low-power Chromebook or rPi before they can
| launch it.
|
| In an ideal world, web browsers would enforce some reasonable
| runtime memory cap (let's say 5MB for now) and CPU limit on
| websites, and users must give permission for the site to break
| the cap.
|
| Or perhaps a search engine that establishes some reasonable
| resource caps and de-ranks websites that break the cap.
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