This solar-powered website offers an alternative vision for a low-carbon future

We ask a lot from ‘the internet’, often without asking what it costs the planet. It turns out, the internet is pretty taxing. “If it were a country, the web would be on track to become the fourth largest CO2 emitter on Earth after the US, China, and India,” says Fast Company.

But there are ways to use less processing power (and therefore electricity). Just getting rid of auto-play videos and animated ads would be a good start, and who would miss them?

Going even further is the humble, very honest, and unexpectedly local Low-tech Magazine website. It is small, static, and self-hosted, running off a small solar panel on the author’s balcony in Barcelona. It asks you to be mindful of your use – showing the amount of charge left in the battery – and will go offline if the author’s house gets a few too many cloudy days. Low-tech uses every technique possible to reduce the burden on their server, from using your browser's default typeface instead of storing their own, to a method of image compression called ‘dithering’.

That’s not to say that the solution to the climate crisis is ever-so-slightly-greener initiatives like dithering images or banning plastic bags, but Low-tech Magazine (both the site itself and the articles they publish) show that life in a drastically lower-energy future doesn’t have to mean deprivation.