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+# Climate impact
+
+
+> Most human endeavours should maintain and publish an environmental cost/benefit report. 
+"Cost" means some environmental impact such as resources used (energy, water, land..)  
+or undesirable waste generated (carbon dioxide, toxins, heat, noise, harm..)
+<!-- --<https://ecoaccounting.org> -->
+
+<div class=pagetoc>
+
+<!-- toc -->
+</div>
+
+Here is the beginnings of one for the hledger project, with a catchier name.
+
+## Development
+Costs related to developing hledger come from:
+
+- developer machine activity
+  - recompiling, linking, building docs, browsing, running IDEs etc.
+- test machine activity
+  - CI workers recompiling on push, on PR updates etc.
+- source code hosting
+  - VCS operations, file and artifact hosting, rich web UIs, issue tracking, forks, notifications (github etc.)
+- public websites and services
+  - hledger.org doc hosting, updating
+  - demo.hledger.org hosting
+  - discussions (matrix, irc, reddit, hacker news..)
+  - media (youtube..)
+  - project analysis (libhunt..)
+
+Benefits:
+- providing effective accounting tools to people and organisations who would be less effective/less empowered by other tools, potentially unlocking further eco accounting activity and successes
+- potentially help advance best practices and community know-how by sharing useful techniques, tools, processes, architecture, patterns
+
+## Delivery
+Costs related to packaging and shipping hledger to end-users. Related to development, but broken out separately here. This includes:
+
+- Github artifact building / additional testing beyond standard dev tests
+- Hackage hosting/maintenance
+- Stackage hosting/maintenance
+- Hosting/maintenance in all the other packaging systems and distributions on the Install page
+- Download/install/cloning/build work done by user machines
+
+Benefits:
+- Roughly speaking, more work done on packaging and delivery means more users able to try out and benefit from the software, magnifying the Development benefits above
+
+## Your hledger usage
+Costs from your individual/organisational usage of hledger, other than Delivery costs above, may include:
+
+- Machine usage every time you run hledger
+- Hardware upgrade/purchase pressure to satisfy memory/disk space requirements
+- Personal and online machine usage and human time while learning, discussing, configuring and maintaining hledger and PTA
+
+Benefits:
+- Hopefully, more effective accounting and eco accounting, reducing waste and increasing personal/organisational solvency, success, empowerment and positive impact
+
+## Stats
+Some useful statistics to guestimate:
+
+- Yearly cost
+- Yearly cost trend
+- Cumulative cost
+- Predicted lifetime cost
+- Comparison with alternate solutions
+