How much does watching one short video add to the world's carbon footprint? How often should you spring-clean the cloud so that servers in data centers do not hum for nothing? Is it more economical to send a text message, an email or a Facebook message? These are questions we mostly do not think about, but perhaps we should.
Everyone can contribute to promoting a green mindset. Photo: Tõnu Tunnel
We have written on the blog before about how energy-intensive it is to maintain the digital society we have grown fond of. An estimated three percent of annual global energy consumption goes to data centers, where the internet we see on our digital devices physically lives. So although data centers are background players that the ordinary consumer never deals with directly, every internet user is responsible for how much data they generate and how much energy they consume with it. Or at least could be.
People often have the illusion that everything that happens online is automatically green, because it seems to leave no physical footprint, or the footprint is simply out of sight. "That way of thinking is not entirely wrong, because the more we replace physical activities, such as driving to the office or to a meeting, with various e-services, the smaller our footprint becomes. The e-world is inherently much smaller in footprint than everything we do in the physical world," confirms Tõnu Grünberg, head of the Baltics' largest data center, Greenergy Data Centers.
"The data we generate still has a considerable ecological impact, though. It is forecast that data centers may consume more than ten percent of annual global energy by 2030," Grünberg notes.
What can each of us do to make the footprint of our daily digital life smaller?
How much CO2 do our habitual online activities generate?
It is true that at the individual level, surfing the internet has a relatively small effect on the world's carbon footprint. A decade ago it was claimed that every Google search generated as much CO2 as boiling water for half a cup of coffee, that is, seven grams. Google calculated at the time that a single search actually produces 0.2 grams of CO2. That is many times less, but it is still a little alarming that even such a simple activity is not free of CO2.
"According to Google's own data, the average user, someone who does 25 searches a day, watches YouTube, uses Gmail and a few other Google services, produces less than eight grams of CO2 a day," adds the head of the greenest data center in the Baltics.
Tõnu Grünberg in the greenest data center in the Baltics. Photo: Andres Oolberg
The figures are of course all over the place and cannot be taken as absolute truth, but the United Nations University magazine Our World writes that watching a video on YouTube generates 0.1 grams of CO2 per minute, so ten minutes make a full gram. A year of using Gmail produces about 1.2 kilograms of CO2. Facebook claims that its average user's annual footprint is 269 grams of CO2, in the same range as the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee.
"Small numbers are quite hard to put in context on their own. Clearly an ordinary web surfer cannot change the world alone; you can wipe your disks and pull the network cable out of the wall, but five billion internet users remain. The question is above all that the technology giants have billions of users worldwide and the volumes are growing fast. As with the emissions of air travel, the real problem with data lies in its rate of growth," Grünberg explains.
On an optimistic note, in the United States, for example, the energy demand of data centers has grown relatively little, although there is no question that data keeps increasing. The reason is that technology advances, and that has allowed IT equipment to do more with the same energy consumption. Unfortunately, technology analysts warn that the future is not so bright.
The more than half-century-old trend called Moore's law, which says the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, must slow down sooner or later, because it is physically ever harder to add transistors to a chip.
What can ordinary people do?
Therefore the energy consumed by data has to be reined in one way or another. "Internet users can play their part here too, by switching to greener providers or simply reducing their data use. You can also buy green energy for your own use or put solar panels on the roof," recommends Tõnu Grünberg, head of Greenergy Data Centers.
Although it is harder to notice your footprint online, a simple rule applies: the more data something takes, the more energy it uses. "The simple fact is that we are all users of e-services and we keep all sorts of information that we will most likely never need again. In reality every bit sits somewhere in a data center and draws electricity," Grünberg notes.
"We could keep as little as possible of the data we do not actually need. That is one very simple way a fully fledged member of the digital society could make themselves even more ecological," he adds.
Where possible, Grünberg recommends keeping data on passive media, storage disks. "Of course you have to accept that if the physical medium is destroyed, that data is gone forever," Grünberg warns that there is no ideal solution here. It is everyone's own decision whether to risk old photos being lost, for example.
A 2019 study by the energy supplier OVO Energy showed that if Britons sent one email fewer a day, the whole country's CO2 emissions could fall by as much as 81,000 London to Madrid flights produce. According to the French think tank The Shift Project, watching online video generated as much CO2 globally in 2018 as the whole of Spain. So the simple answer to reducing energy consumption: watch fewer cat videos.
Worse than cat videos, of course, are streaming platforms such as Netflix, for the simple reason that films and series last longer than cute clips. According to Netflix, one hour of streaming generates almost 100 grams of CO2. More precisely, the Carbon Trust says the European average is 55 to 56 grams of CO2 per hour of streaming.
Here we would remind you that media consumption in general is not good for the environment (perhaps only if you watch a nature documentary that raises your awareness of climate issues, but even then there is no escaping the footprint).
It is important to understand that this problem did not arise with streaming, far from it. The carbon footprint of streaming is much smaller than that of any physical format. Talking about listening to music, which today is largely done on Spotify, one hour of media streaming is estimated to have a carbon footprint of about 55 grams of CO2, whereas for CDs the figure is three times higher because of the CO2 spent in manufacturing, and vinyl and cassettes emit more than two kilograms (!) of CO2 per unit. On the other hand, it has been calculated that if you listen to one album more than 27 times, it would be more environmentally friendly to buy the CD instead of streaming.
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are also one of many new technologies, like artificial intelligence, giving climate experts a headache. It is feared that their ever-growing energy consumption could wipe out the efforts to fight global warming.
SMS, email or DM?
By now it probably comes as no surprise that sending an email, a text message or a DM (a private message on social media, for example on Instagram or Messenger) all have an environmental impact. But not quite the same one! The point is that the three do not use quite the same technologies. While DMs and emails travel over the internet, text messages use the channels of ordinary telephony.
"For the most sustainable messaging, SMS is recommended, at least when you need to send short text messages. For the rest you still have to use DMs or emails. To be as economical as possible even then, you can always send fewer pictures, videos or other bulky content. And finally the device you use to read and send messages plays a role too. I would not want to anger the eye doctors, but reading messages on a phone with a small screen uses less energy than reading email on a large computer monitor," explains the head of the greenest data center in the Baltics.
There is no question that every effort to preserve our planet and contribute to sustainable development is welcome. If you want to do your bit, keep an eye on your media consumption and how you consume it, on how you exchange and store information, and delete unnecessary files. We can all make small choices every day that make our ecological footprint a little smaller. If enough people do it, the effect is noticeable.