Mayor and his dog under fire for website’s carbon impact

A MAYOR has been accused of damaging the environment because his website takes a long time to load due to a lot of high-resolution photos, many of which feature his dog, Angel.

The bizarre political manoeuvring comes from the South Gloucestershire Conservatives and is levelled against Dan Norris, the newly-elected West of England Mayor.

Ben Burton, a Conservative councillor on South Gloucestershire Council, told a meeting last week that Mr Norris’s website produces 6.57 grams of CO2 every time it is accessed.

This makes it worse than 96 per cent of government websites, placing it among the most polluting local authority websites in the UK.

A website, like all things that use the internet, requires electricity to load its component parts, such as pictures, videos and articles.

The more and higher-quality those assets are, the more data they require to load, and the more energy that requires.

For example, a text-only website will require much less data to download than one that has complex graphics, fancy animations, and high-definition videos.

The Conservatives criticised Mr Norris’s

“digital self-promotion” and stated that the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) website produces enough CO2 over the course of a year to boil water for 100,000 cups of tea.

“These figures make for damning reading,” Cllr Burton said, according to Bristol Live.

“The worst performing website in our region and one of the worst in the UK as a whole is WECA.

“Based on the amount of carbon it produces a year, it would require somewhere in the region of 36 trees – an

‘I urge Mayor Norris to place the climate emergency above photos of him, and often of him and his dog’

orchard – to absorb the environmental impact. Looking at the facts, the main reason for this is almost entirely due to the need for visitors to use a large amount of data to download high resolution portraits of mayor Dan Norris each time the site is visited.

“So I urge Mayor Norris to place the climate emergency above photos of him, and quite often photos of him and his dog.”

Mr Norris has been approached for comment.