Essay by Eric Worrall

The COP website has a “low carbon” toggle which has been criticised as having minimal impact on the site energy usage.

United Nations COP28 climate summit reworks website following greenwashing allegations over ‘low carbon’ toggle

By Tom Williams

Organisers of the COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have reworked their event’s official website following allegations of greenwashing over a “low carbon” toggle which was found to have a minor impact on the site’s energy usage.

Key points:

• The website of the COP28 climate conference was modified after it was accused of greenwashing
• A toggle for a “low carbon version” of the site was found to have little impact on the site’s energy use
• Site updates were welcomed by a web sustainability consult, but they said “more needs to be done”

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The toggle’s effectiveness has been criticised by experienced website developers who have accused COP28 organisers of greenwashing — a term referring to making misleading or false claims about the environmental sustainability of a product or service.

ABC News initially found that when the “low carbon” toggle was switched on, the COP28 site did not display some of its images, but still downloaded all of them in the background — offering only a minuscule amount of energy saving.

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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-31/un-cop28-climate-summit-accused-greenwashing-website-low-carbon/103020978

I tried the toggle, the website then appeared to malfunction until I reloaded it. The malfunction might have been due to my less than perfect internet connection.

The main impact of the toggle appears to be to switch off some of the annoying animations, which includes pictures of solar panels and large concrete structures.

The ABC criticism may be a bit unfair. High resolution graphics animations can actually burn a fair bit of electricity, that is why computer graphics cards often need fancy heatsinks. But frankly I can’t be bothered to work out something so ridiculously trivial, whether the burn from running an on screen animation is significant compared to the energy required to push information halfway around the world.

Yep, for sure these people are going to save the world this time.