← Home Transparency

What did this site cost the climate?

These numbers are order-of-magnitude estimates of the CO₂-equivalent emissions from producing the data, building the site, hosting it, and viewing it.

0 g CO₂e
Cumulative project total 93 commits · this build bad4c8d · generated Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:59:40 GMT
That's roughly equivalent to
7.2 km in an average gas car
24.0 hours of video streaming
4,313 Google searches
108 smartphone charges
Breakdown Hover for amounts
Claude API 91.8%
GitHub Actions CI 5.4%
Earth Engine processing 1.5%
Data egress from EE → Drive 0.9%
Local statistical analysis 0.5%

Line items

Click any row to reveal its assumptions
Claude API — all dev sessions accrues per commit 792.0 g

Cumulative across all 93 commits. Every new conversation adds to the running total.

Tokens to date
~4,950k input · ~990k output
Baseline
300k in + 60k out
Per commit
+50k in · +10k out
Intensity
0.1 Wh/1k input · 1.5 Wh/1k output [5]
GitHub Actions CI — all builds accrues per commit 46.5 g

Every push to main runs the build and test suite on a GitHub-hosted runner.

Runs to date
186 workflow runs
Per run
1.5 min × 2 vCPU × 12.5 W/vCPU [6]
Earth Engine processing one-time 12.6 g

Serverless Earth Engine batch tasks, run once per full pipeline.

Scope
63 parks, processed once
CPU time
2 min/park
Intensity
15 Wh/CPU-hr [3]
Data egress from EE → Drive one-time 7.4 g

Daily DAYMET + ERA5 tables transferred out of EE storage.

Volume
6 MB/park × 63 ≈ 0.4 GB
Intensity
50 Wh/GB [4]
Local statistical analysis one-time 4.2 g

Annual aggregates, Mann–Kendall tests, Theil–Sen slopes. Runs on a laptop.

CPU time
30 s/park
Draw
20 W

Recurring cost per reader

After the project is built, each visit is nearly free
0.023g CO₂e
Per page view
A 60-second read on a phone. ~0.5 MB transfer at 2 W.
98g CO₂e
Hosting per month
GitHub Pages serving ~10,000 monthly views. ~50 Wh/GB.
Why this matters. By publishing pre-computed aggregates and trends instead of asking every visitor to run their own Earth Engine jobs, we amortize the ~863 g project cost across tens of thousands of readers, for < 1 g of CO₂e per visit. Grid intensity assumed at 400 g/kWh (between Google Cloud's reported ~300 g/kWh [1] and the IEA's 2023 global average of ~480 g/kWh [2]).

Sources

  1. [1]
    Google 2024 Environmental Report
    Google · 2024 · sustainability.google
  2. [2]
    Electricity 2024 — Analysis and forecast to 2026
    IEA · 2024 · iea.org
  3. [3]
    Recalibrating global data center energy-use estimates (Science, 367)
    Masanet, Shehabi, Lei, Smith, Koomey · 2020 · science.org
  4. [4]
    Electricity intensity of internet data transmission (J. Industrial Ecology, 22)
    Aslan, Mayers, Koomey, France · 2018 · wiley.com
  5. [5]
    Estimating the carbon footprint of BLOOM (JMLR 24) + Anthropic disclosures
    Luccioni, Viguier, Ligozat · 2023 · jmlr.org
  6. [6]
    About GitHub-hosted runners — hardware specifications
    GitHub · 2024 · docs.github.com
  7. [7]
    The real climate and transformative impact of ICT (Patterns, 2)
    Freitag, Berners-Lee, Widdicks, Knowles, Blair, Friday · 2021 · cell.com
  8. [8]
    Greenhouse gas emissions from a typical passenger vehicle
    U.S. EPA · 2023 · epa.gov