My first step starts out searching searching in Ecosia. I haven’t looked deeply into the exact impact but there are offhand enough evidence to convince me that the positive impact is worth the cost of a slightly worse search engine than google and slightly less privacy than duckduckgo.
If I can’t find a satisfying answer in Ecosia I switch to google.
It’s probably only worth using ecosia if you think your time is virtually worthless. Tree planting is mostly a useless activity in the grand scheme of things, though one gets into a somewhat complicated calculation to show this.
Google claims there are 3*10^12 trees in the world, ecosia claims to have planted about 10^8. Trees are in an equilibrium with a bunch of stuff like atmospheric CO2 as well. Your personal contribution to the number of trees via ecosia is likely ~ a few trees (not clear whether they reach maturity though).
Do anything else useful with your time before this.
On the effectiveness of treeplanting: Would you mind linking to those calculations? Trees remove ~130 giga ton CO2 annually and with your number ecosias trees remove ~4*10^6 tonnes CO2 which is something like 10% of the worlds annual CO2 emission from fossile fuel. Granted, its a lot more complicated and it obviously isn’t a feasible permanent solution given saturation and whatnot but it seems like an intuitive delaying measure, at least insofar as their forests take a good while to reach maturations.
On Ecosia: Their April financial statement says they spend 14% of their income on green investment so it’s not exclusively treeplanting.
Can’t you simply e.g. donate 200$ each year to offset this ? E.g. google charge (I think) ~1$/click for a US demographic (some exceptions, blah blah) and how many search engine ads do you click ? For me it’s ~0, but let’s say… 100 a year ? add to that like 1$ hundred impressions + 10,000 searches a year. Granted, this is a very rough number, but I’m being rather charitable with the profit here, I think, considering a large part of that is actually operational costs.
It seems like your search data is hardly worth more than that, and the advantages of using google are many in terms of time saving. Enough to be e.g. worth 200$.
I get why one wouldn’t want to use google for ethical reasons, but at the eod all the search engines which use a centralized structure are equally bad, they just happen not to hold a monopoly (however, in that case, if you’re just anti-monopoly, you might as well use e.g. Bing which seems closest to google in terms of quality)
Thanks for helping me realize that searching on Ecosia does squat when I’m not clicking adds. Looks like they make money per click and also per puchase through adds.
My first step starts out searching searching in Ecosia. I haven’t looked deeply into the exact impact but there are offhand enough evidence to convince me that the positive impact is worth the cost of a slightly worse search engine than google and slightly less privacy than duckduckgo.
If I can’t find a satisfying answer in Ecosia I switch to google.
It’s probably only worth using ecosia if you think your time is virtually worthless. Tree planting is mostly a useless activity in the grand scheme of things, though one gets into a somewhat complicated calculation to show this.
Google claims there are 3*10^12 trees in the world, ecosia claims to have planted about 10^8. Trees are in an equilibrium with a bunch of stuff like atmospheric CO2 as well. Your personal contribution to the number of trees via ecosia is likely ~ a few trees (not clear whether they reach maturity though).
Do anything else useful with your time before this.
On the effectiveness of treeplanting: Would you mind linking to those calculations? Trees remove ~130 giga ton CO2 annually and with your number ecosias trees remove ~4*10^6 tonnes CO2 which is something like 10% of the worlds annual CO2 emission from fossile fuel. Granted, its a lot more complicated and it obviously isn’t a feasible permanent solution given saturation and whatnot but it seems like an intuitive delaying measure, at least insofar as their forests take a good while to reach maturations.
On Ecosia: Their April financial statement says they spend 14% of their income on green investment so it’s not exclusively treeplanting.
Can’t you simply e.g. donate 200$ each year to offset this ? E.g. google charge (I think) ~1$/click for a US demographic (some exceptions, blah blah) and how many search engine ads do you click ? For me it’s ~0, but let’s say… 100 a year ? add to that like 1$ hundred impressions + 10,000 searches a year. Granted, this is a very rough number, but I’m being rather charitable with the profit here, I think, considering a large part of that is actually operational costs.
It seems like your search data is hardly worth more than that, and the advantages of using google are many in terms of time saving. Enough to be e.g. worth 200$.
I get why one wouldn’t want to use google for ethical reasons, but at the eod all the search engines which use a centralized structure are equally bad, they just happen not to hold a monopoly (however, in that case, if you’re just anti-monopoly, you might as well use e.g. Bing which seems closest to google in terms of quality)
Thanks for helping me realize that searching on Ecosia does squat when I’m not clicking adds. Looks like they make money per click and also per puchase through adds.