Building a Solarpunk Web: Open Source for a Sustainable Digital Future
summary
Web measurement shows scale and targets: the Web Almanac scans 17 million sites with Google Lighthouse and finds the average page is larger than Doom’s initial download, driven by heavy client-side JavaScript that shifts energy to unoptimized devices. Open source tooling highlighted includes the Green Web Foundation and Green Software Foundation plus methods to estimate Kubernetes carbon. The W3 community group is drafting scope 3 emissions criteria and practical guidelines; an Arduino solar demo site proves solar-hosted pages can run but don’t yet scale for large production.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Solarpunk and web sustainability
- 3:08What is Solarpunk
- 13:01Web as future-making tech
- 15:54Environmental cost of modern web
- 24:39Sustainability guidelines and standards
- 29:59Open source sustainability
- 34:12Measuring digital carbon emissions
- 38:42Closing thoughts and call to action
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