Does a chess.com have any green commitments?

Does anyone know if chess.com has any plans for Earth Day?

That the climate is changing rapidly due to human activities is a fact, not a political opinion. Chess.com's servers use large amounts of energy. The issue is therefore highly relevant.

How exactly is THAT supposed to work?

Hamster-powered generators?

Wind power etc.

Let me get this straight... an office building in the city is going to detach itself from the electrical grid and instead cover itself with windmills? I can't believe you're serious.

How many windmills on the roof does it take to run a major computing center? What about a storm? Or a dead calm? Or vandalism? Or pigeons? Or pigeon vandalism?

An office building in the city has no options for switching power sources. Talk to the US government instead.

CCs serves is probably not in an officebuilding. I guess they will use to much space and power to that. But a wind mill or sun panels could be installed almost anywhere. And you can also buy compensation. Etc.

You tackle the renewable energy problem at the government level, by convincing the government that a political party who ignores the global warming problem gets voted OUT.

Trying to tackle the problem at the grass-roots level is grotesquely inefficient, and can easily make the situation WORSE, not better. You do realize that it requires a LOT of energy to isolate and purify silicon, and to dope it to the required semiconductor grade. If the process is inefficiently done, you can end up making MORE pollution and global warming, not less.

... not to mention the other requirements. Indium, for example, for the transparent conductive surfaces required by solar cells. Where does your Indium come from, for making your solar panels? China? The world's worst CO2 polluter? Can you switch to a more ecologically friendly source? There are only a handful of nations that produce Rare Earths in quantity, and none of them are what you would describe as "ecologically responsible" nations. [EDIT: Canada produces Indium. A few dozen tons per year.]

There is such a thing as "economy of scale". It means that small-scale solutions are inherently less efficient and more expensive than large-scale solutions. A hundred thousand small-scale solutions will require a hundred times (or perhaps a thousand times) as much effort, energy and resources as it would take to solve the problem at the proper scale.

Global warming should be tackled at the SOURCE.

Big websites use energy in big scale!

Are you thinking of Crypto-currency mining? That's the only IT-oriented industry that I'm aware of that uses massive amounts of energy. Crypto-mining has nothing to do with websites.

I don't htink it's either/or -- or it needn't be. At a certain point, I take the point that government policy is a lot more important than what individuals can do, but that doesn't mean individuals shouldn't do things. Building habits and trying to share them with others lays the groudnwork for people to grasp the importance of changing how we operate on a broader level, which builds the preconditions for government policy.

There's limitations to the "individidual responsibility" approach to addressing climate if it's framed as *only* that and serves to delegitimate national and international action, or to suggest that such actions are unnecessary. But it doesn't seem to me that pressuring a company you patronize to act responsibly really deligitimizes state action.

Websites use servers that use huge amounts of energy. Facebook are building a enormous server center outside my town. It use absurdly much energy. All the calculations needed to present us with a site that works almost instantly are not for free.

The question is, what does "act responsibly" mean in terms of a web-site?

Demanding that they stop using throw-away plastic is GOOD. That is something that an individual business can DO, and it helps alleviate the problem.

But demanding that they "switch to green energy" is fatuous. How is that supposed to work?

They use a lot less energy when consolidated into large-scale cloud-oriented servers.

"An article published recently in the Joule scientific journal, cites the cases of two large international network operators, Telefónica and Cogent, based on reported data traffic and energy use for the COVID year of 2020. Telefónica handled a 45 percent jump in data on its network with no increase in energy use. Cogent’s electricity use fell 21 percent even as data traffic increased 38 percent."

The above was made possible by consolidating several inefficient local data centers into single large data centers, which would benefit from economy of scale.

It might mean installing solar panels on their buildings, but it might also mean buying into some sort of offset program. I think there are meaningful critiques of such market-based offsets, at least if they're made the centerpiece of a vision of an ecologically sustainable society to the exclusion of stricter governmental and intergovernmental measures (which is sometimes how they're framed). But it's hard for me to see how pushing companies you patronize to do such things is itself counterproductive.

I guess we'll have to see if the site releases anything for Earth Day. I'm loving the debate, though!