I’ve amended these words through the Google Docs app on my phone. Chances are, you’ve done something similar yourself today, or maybe you’ve used online maps or performed a brief internet search. Perhaps you posted on social media or played music through a streaming site. Surprise! You’re killing the world.
Every tech activity, whether it’s watching Youtube or playing a computer game, has a carbon footprint. That spam email you receive, the Whatsapp group messages you ignore, each produce CO2 emissions. There are the obvious reasons – plugging in your laptop or charging your phone – but more shocking are the vast amounts of energy needed for data centres and web servers. Content storage requires power; those five accidental screenshots of your phone’s lockscreen that end up on iCloud? Blame those for climate chaos.
I might sometimes feel smug for doing the “right” things – shopping for food with low air miles, using ethical finance (most major banks and pension schemes invest in fossil fuels), avoiding peat in my garden compost – but my tech carbon footprint must be off the charts. And though this may have you asking what exactly we can do, digital is still often better than traditional means. What’s important to remember, though, is just because it’s non-physical doesn’t mean that it’s not flawed.
Imagine you searched for “how to save the Earth”. The energy needed for a single search is minimal; it’s all our combined searches on different gadgets that raise eyebrows. Some estimates state that the total footprint of our devices, our online world and the infrastructure that enables it, adds up to approximately 3.7 per cent of global greenhouse emissions. That’s about the same as the airline industry. And it’s a number set to double within four years. With all this in mind, our tech usage starts to amount to a serious concern. That aphorism beloved of Redditors, “lamps in video games use real electricity”, truly takes on meaning now.
In Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad Are Bananas?, the carbon consultant calculates that even before being turned on, a new iMac has the same carbon footprint as a return flight from Glasgow to Madrid. Mobile phones add up to about 1 per cent of global emissions with their manufacture, continual charging, connecting to the internet and data storage. Then there are emails. A typical office worker has on average 140 emails flying in and out of their inbox per day, with more than half being spam. Over the course of a year, this adds up to creating the same amount of CO2 as a flight from London to Bruges.
When you take into account the data centres that hold these emails, it starts to get complicated. It takes a lot of electricity to store all of our websites and content, both to power the machinery and the air conditioning to stop them overheating. People’s appetite for digital content isn’t going anywhere, and the footprint of this infrastructure is only rising. The energy used by data centres is set to double within the next ten years, but the carbon-emission statistics from them are contentious. While some are run on renewable energy, other companies purchase questionable carbon-offsetting schemes. Maybe you should try deleting more emails
from your inbox.
Those accidental screenshots of your lockscreen that end up on iCloud? Blame those for climate chaos
Only half of the world’s population uses the internet and although numbers are rising as more of us get devices, a report by Oxfam showed that the world’s richest 10 per cent caused 52 per cent of global emissions from 1990 to 2015. It is obvious that those of us in developed countries are responsible for the vast majority of the internet’s carbon footprint. The people in most danger from the impacts of climate breakdown, though, are those that have done the least to cause it.
Bitcoin is a stark example of this disparity. The algorithmic process by which “mining centres” produce the cryptocurrency is extremely energy-intensive; computers require huge amounts of power to solve the equations that secure the virtual money. A recent study estimated that Bitcoin, used by less than 0.5 per cent of the world’s population, is responsible for around 53 million megatonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions every year. This is roughly the same as Sweden. Because of this, Mongolia looks to be banning Bitcoin “mining” and the New York State senate is discussing a bill that could cease such operations while it examines their environmental impact and whether they will cause the state to miss its emission targets.
What we think of as “green behaviours” can be a confluence of the good and the bad, whatever is best marketed to us, whatever is most convenient for us to implement in our lives, and a whole lot of misinformation. It’s better to try than to not try at all, of course. There is an oft-touted statistic that 100 companies are responsible for 71 per cent of carbon emissions, and though not strictly correct, there is an underlying truth in the fact that major corporations have been passing the pollution buck for years. None of this alters the reality that we should all make changes as individuals.
Upgrading your phone and computer less often is one way to help. There are simple online behaviours too. The differences in footprints between SMS messages and standard voice calls over their digital counterparts are negligible, but there. The BBC reports that online video content accounts for roughly 1 per cent of global carbon emissions per year, and a third of that traffic is pornography. Use your imagination when wanking and save humanity. The same article stated that if every adult in Britain cut out unnecessary thankyou replies for a year, it could save 16,433 tonnes of carbon – the same as 3,334 diesel cars taken off the road.
Somewhere in all this endless counting is a shaky conclusion. Wading through all these numbers, you realise how much we have to change – a shift in all our lifestyles that goes well beyond tallying up emissions for each email. It’s easy to say that we are focusing on the little things because we can control them personally and the bigger picture is so daunting and seemingly impossible to tackle. If there are much larger issues at play, why begrudge us our doom-scrolling?
These numbers matter because we need to face up to every one of our actions, systems and consumer purchases, rethinking them from the ground up and beginning anything new with its potential environmental impact factored in from the get-go. All of this is necessary to ensure that the inevitable results of the climate crisis will be a best-case scenario. No single approach will help get us there, but in examining all that we do, we can notice remedies.
Bill Gates has said that if we don’t do anything about it, “by 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as Covid-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.” This all requires a revolution of sorts, one that we all need to be on the side of for it to succeed. We should keep counting everything.
