What does Co2Stats.com do?

Co2 Stats is a company that promises to make any web site a zero carbon emission website.  They ask websites to put a widget on their site that calculates, in real-time, the carbon footprint of that site.  Then, on a periodic basis, they aggregate the carbon footprints of all of their websites with widgets and purchase carbon offsets from a carbon exchange - thus theoretically making them "green."  Hit refresh on this page you will see the counter (located on the left side of the page) go up.

Who is Behind Co2 Stats?

Tim Sulivan and Alex Wissner-Gross are the founders of Maxtility, the company behind Co2 Stats.  "Our mission is to make the Internet Green" according to Alex.   Co2 Stats started in August of 2006, has 2 full time people, are self funded and have about 1,250 sites signed up using their service.  Their creds are below:

Tim Sullivan
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Tim Sullivan received an M.Phil. and M.A. from Yale University, where he is currently completing his Ph.D. He received an A.B. from Boston College, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa cum laude. He has three pending patents and has been featured in Wired, Reuters, and The LA Times. In addition to his work as a technologist, Sullivan is also an expert in the History of Art. The recipient of dozens of awards, he has served as a private consultant to art collectors. He is the author of Reflections on the Connolly Book of Hours and numerous articles in national publications. He is a Director of the Yale Club of Boston.

Alex Wissner-Gross
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Alex Wissner-Gross is a Hertz Fellow in Physics at Harvard University. He has authored 14 publications and received 80 national and international distinctions. In 2003, Alex became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics, while graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. His research has been covered in BusinessWeek, Wired, USA Today, New Scientist, and The New York Times. Before his science and technology career, Alex performed as a boy soprano with the New York City Opera Company.

What They Say

"Our ultimate goal with Maxtility is to make the physical world programmable" says Alex. "We see CO2Stats as an important step in that direction, because it provides the instrumentation for websites, and ultimately other products and services, to be intelligent enough as to understand and manage their own environmental footprints. In the future, we expect that our technology will  open up a wealth of novel applications, including intelligent routing and subsidization of geographically-localized renewable energy, secure peer-to-peer environmental footprint trading and exchanges between individual devices, and devices that automatically and privately purchase offsets in real-time during usage." 

My Reaction and Analysis

When I first came across Co2 Stats, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical.  So I got on the horn with them and spend a couple of hours grilling them on their idea and their approach to see for myself whether or not I thought they were valid.  I broke down my findings into the 3 areas that I thought were the most relevant (or at least the most relevent to me) - 1) how they calculate the carbon footprint 2) how they prove they are actually buying legitimate offsets for every website and 3) how they make money.

How Does Co2 Stats Calculate Carbon Offsets? 

Ok.  So here it goes - Alex and Tim say they have a proprietary algorithm that calculates the carbon emissions created when a user comes to any given website and loads a page on that website.  They also say that they are going to be sharing the details of the algorithm later this year. 

So what's my analysis?  Mixed.  I think that what they are attempting is valid and they are going about it in an honorable way, but I think their methodology has omissions that could lead websites, their customers, to accidentally or incorrectly claim to be carbon-zero or "green" when they are not. 

While they wouldn't share exactly what their algorithm was I did find out the following, it only attempt to calculate the impacts of users coming to a site, it does not include the impacts of servers and it does not automatically calculated the impact of an entire website simply by putting the widget on the home page. These are fairly significant issues for me because I worry that, by default, any website with this widget on its homepage only, appears to be claiming that it is measuring and offseting the footprint of the entire website.  In addition, there is no current way to know that the only thing being offset is the consumer side of the equation and not the server side.

How Does Co2 Stats Prove Carbon Credit Legitimacy?

Ok.  On this note they do a little better, but still need some tuning (which it looks like they plan on doing.) What they do is periodically sum up all of the carbon footprints of their customers and then buy carbon offsets from Sustainable Travel International (which is a reputable .org)  Their plans are to have a free program, where carbon offsets are purchased in aggregate and a "pro" program where people pay to have access to more features from their service and more information. 

My take.  It is incredibly important for Co2 Stats to maintain legitimacy and I wasn't satisfied with their approach to proving and reporting the carbon offset purchases for the free accounts.  What I would like to see them do is assign account numbers to each free account (in order to make them anonymous) and then share a report that shows how they calculate the aggregate purchase they are making.  Otherwise how does any of the free accounts know that Co2 Stats is telling the truth about the aggregate numbers.  Note: I want to say that I specifically have no reason whatsoever to not trust Co2Stats, in fact they were more than open with me, but I think that every user, whether free or pro should be able to ensure that offsets were purchased for their account. 

How Does Co2 Stats Make Money?

Ads and potentially some mechanism in the pro accounts.  Of course that is how everyone make money.  I have to say that I wasn't surprised to hear this, but I have to say I am concerned about this approach.  The general approach, or at least my assumption of the general approach here, is to get as many people as possible to sign up for the free account (hopefully millions) and then get as many of those as possible to convert to paid accounts for the promise of more and better features - or maybe just the threat of being cancelled.

My read.  I don't know...  Co2 Stats has 1,250 sites signed up now, whereby 1/4 are corporate web sites and 3/4 are green blogs.  They are getting 2% growth per day (which roughly translates to doubling every month) and they are getting OK press.  My concern is two-fold.  For one, they need much bigger numbers if they want to charge or support the service with ads and they need to come up with a way of calculating carbon emissions without have access to sensitive traffic numbers or by getting access in mass.  Secondly, I would pay if a company could really accurately measure my website carbon emissions and provide auditable reporting to prove I am really green - otherwise, I don't know if I would pay for a partial solution.  I would never put my own company in a position where I could be accused of Greenwashing.

Overall, I like these guys and think they are really trying to do something that has a lot of importance in the long run.  If, and I say if at this point, we can create a system to accurately measure and report the entire carbon impacts of every website then we can accurately offset those websites.  But, I think that Co2 Stats is a long way from that goal.  What they are doing now is the easy part, the hard part will be complexities revolving around server side calculations and providing auditable reporting to serious companies.

Posted by Steve Newcomb on February 25, 2008 04:21 PM | Permalink