How dirty is digital?
The technology sector generated more emissions than aviation in 2018
Simple climate action // I S S U E 1 4 // D I G I T A L L I F E
The benefit and burden of our online habit
By Jemima Kiss
At the dawn of history in about 1999 AD, I remember a friend suggesting I get a Hotmail account before my trip to New Zealand. It’s free, he assured me. I got one, I used it, it became the norm. About five years later Google launched Gmail, and we were all similarly thrilled by their generosity in letting us use their email service for free, and with all that storage. How kind.
After nearly 20 years on the technology reporting beat, my misty-eyed enthusiasm has, of course, fermented into weary cynicism about the tech industry. We know that none of these services are free; if we don’t pay upfront, we pay with our attention, our privacy, even our democracy. The ‘generosity’ of the infinite storage these companies bestowed on us — you’ll never need to throw anything away! — is actually a rouse to accumulate as much data as possible to inform their advertising, and to train their machine learning systems. Whether email and comments or photos and video, our digital lives are just grist to the tech giants’ mills, and we seem to want to keep feeding them.
I feel the heaviness of these complex interactions whenever I’m online, which is most of my waking life. And added to that is an increasing awareness of another burden — the knowledge that our digital activity demands a huge amount of energy, much of which is generated by fossil fuels. The lightness and informality of our digital lives are an illusion; that decade of online photos and videos I don’t need and never look at are sat on an actual server that uses real energy. Everything from email and messaging to video streaming and Bitcoin has a carbon footprint.
The technology sector as a whole accounts for 3.7% of global emissions, but could reach 14% by 2040 as more people— and more computers — come online. It’s a complicated issue, though as our reporter Elle Hunt explores next week, there’s no need to cancel your Netflix account just yet. The solution is less obvious than, say, dealing with food waste. We’ll speak to experts who understand the impact, explore the solutions, and explain how we can all help.
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‘You shouldn’t feel bad for leading a normal digital life’
Ketan Joshi began blogging about wind energy in Australia in 2013, debunking misinformation deliberately shared by politicians and a notoriously partisan media. Climate action and renewable energy remain deeply divisive across Australia, and Joshi has become a key campaigner against a government that seems determined not to act on reducing emissions. “It’s just not their thing,” he quipped recently.
Joshi spent several years as researcher for government and renewable energy firms, before moving to Norway and authoring a book on renewable energy and climate change. He learnt the most, he says, when he started to work in towns impacted by new renewables projects. People often had misgivings about the developments not because they opposed renewables, or even because they believed the misinformation — but because they felt shut out of the process.
The key to mobilizing people, Joshi realized, is a sense of ownership in the solution — making people feel like stakeholders in a positive change.
Our digital carbon footprints are a great example of why the transition to low-carbon energy sources is so vital. Lockdown proved how critical the internet is for communication, for work, education and health — not to mention entertainment and wellbeing. The biggest systematic change the tech industry can take is to shift to renewable energy, making sure those with corporate and governmental power make changes at scale, he explains.
As told to Elle Hunt. Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity
We know with absolute certainty that electricity is the quickest and easiest thing to decarbonize. Converting fossil fuel grids to renewables is where you get the biggest, quickest gains, and that’s happening right now — obviously not as fast as it should be, but much quicker than anybody anticipated last decade. This change has momentum: your Netflix today is greener than your Netflix yesterday, and the Netflix the year before, and the Netflix in 2010. The step for the next decade is taking cars, buildings, and all these other associated industries and making them electric, while also making the grid clean.
Carbon footprint framing came from the fossil fuels industry wanting to put the burden on people to change their lives. We might look up the carbon footprint of all digital engagement compared to aviation and say it seems bad to send all those emails — but server farms, computers, and the associated infrastructure all consume electricity. Before you even get into the numbers, that separates it from aviation and shipping, which run on engines that burn fossil fuels and are much harder to decarbonize.
The inefficiency locked into the fossil-fuel economy is eye-watering. Two-thirds of emissions from fossil fuels is from the waste heat generated when you burn them: there’s no way around it, that’s physics. One-third of rail movement around the world is just moving fossil fuels around. A massive proportion of flights are pointless business trips, like flying to a meeting. When future generations look back at this, they will find it deeply comical.
You shouldn’t feel bad for leading a normal digital life. When it comes down to the power consumption of requesting 100kb of data from a server, it stretches the bounds of what we, as individuals, can do about climate change. Assigning a decision-making moral burden to streaming a song definitely has an air of targeting younger generations. It’s a slap in the face to a generation that has been constantly told it’s too hard to decarbonize the grid to then be told they should also feel bad about watching The Queen’s Gambit.
The moral burden of the climate crisis should be on people either causing the problem, or delaying the solution. The easier pathway is to get corporations with much more concentrated power to change. It takes less effort for six people in a boardroom to say ‘We are adjusting our business so that we are not harming people as we make money’ than it is for a million people to make a slight adjustment in their behavior, and it has more impact.
Collective, community action gets left out of the ‘systemic versus individual’ conversation, but it is a great way for people to use their influence. It’s still good to decide to cycle to your kid’s school instead of driving. It is even better to push for a bike lane to be installed in your area, or to write to your representative to ask for renewable energy. Community action short-circuits the dichotomy that says ‘the consumer should feel guilty’ or ‘it’s all on corporations’, which is a bit outdated. It goes a long way to addressing the helplessness that people feel.
Climate action should be presented as a positive: being part of a mobilization to save our entire species. People want to be part of it, that’s why the Climate March and School Strike movement have been so amazingly successful. The question with the transition to renewables is who gets to participate, and who gets to benefit. Involving people is the fastest way, whether it’s through the planning process, or giving them discounted electricity. Countries that have done the best with electricity decarbonization have done it either through an aggressive government program or through community ownership of clean energy. When you put a solar panel on your rooftop, that’s climate action.
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Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Jemima Kiss, Mike Coren, and Jim Giles. Everything we publish is free to read — your donations fund our writers and artists.
