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I wouldn't quite call it a "carbon footprint". I'd call it an electron footprint. Since electrons are recyclable, the only wasted items are the hard drive space the web site is occupying somewhere in cyberspace, the electricity to keep the data refreshed, and the time wasted of someone who stumbles across it.

... uh, and where do you think the electrons come from?

The nice people at the power station pick electrons off the electron tree, of course. They are free, infinite, and smell like a rose... for sure.



That electricity to run the server hosting the site, and viewers' PCs, comes from somewhere, and chances are that source of power is made with a result of pollution.

So the servers hosting those sites are running on holy spirit?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I do believe running servers (or generating the electricity for them) does generate quite a lot of carbon thus leaving a carbon footprint...

You people are really getting anoying with this carbon crap. Nobody denies its a problem, but you are now in a full blown witchhunt mode. All those sites abandoned by their owners are on shared hosting solutions, probably free ones (do you pay for the stuff you dont use?), which means that those carbonated electrons will feed the server either way. 
Differentially speaking, each and every one of us produce larger carbon footprints by farting in the pub then are all these web sites producing combined.

err... sense of humour bypass maybe?

Rather ironic, as I'm currently involved in a project to revamp the control systems for an electrical generating station in the Niagara Falls, NY area. The station is converting from coal to wood and replacing all their early 1980's era control systems at the same time. I can unequivocally state that electricity is generated using processes that have a HUGE carbon footprint. Whether it's coal (which by the way is really, really dirty and the dust gets into everything, AND it's conductive), or wood (slightly cleaner), there is a huge amount of carbon being oxidized (burned) to carbon dioxide to produce the steam which turns the turbine which is connected to the generator, ah hell, you get the point.

And yes, there are hydro powered stations here at the Falls, in fact, ALL of the water could be used for power generation, but some (~20%) is left for the falls so that the tourists will go oooh and ahhh, and spend lots of nice pretty money on accomodations and meals and shiny trinkets.

But most places, especially in the American midwest don't have waterfalls they can rape in order to generate electricity, so the present alternative is to burn something, Coal, wood, oil, trash, gas, it's all the same, a large amount of carbon gets oxidized to carbon dioxide, hydrogen gets oxidized to hydrogen dioxide (water), and some noxious stuff like nitrous oxides and sulfur oxides are formed which become acids when they cool and couple with the water vapor usually present in air.

If no one visits a website, does it use any electricity?

It's just some stored bits on a hard drive somewhere. If no one hits it, it doesn't pull any CPU cycles.

You all seem to be missing the big picture here. A lot of these abandoned websites run on servers which host multiple sites, so even if we got rid of a few of these websites we still need to keep the servers going for the others. So it is hardly worthwhile squawking on about carbon footprints.

@Rich Wargo:

Interesting (but not surprising) to hear that the Falls themselves aren't exactly providing enough power for even the local region these days.

Since you notice the problem, have you looked into the feasibility of the 'liquid chimney' (AKA 'carbon bong') concept in that application? It's been getting a lot of press, gases in, gravel out.