Every few months I run across some nonsensical news story about how the Internet is killing the planet. A typical example is an article by Alex Roslin from the Vancouver Sun’s website,
It’s Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.
Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
Sure, it’s not a lot on its own — but add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million daily tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you’re making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers.
What I hate about these stories is that they almost always depict daily interactions with the Internet or computers in exactly this sort of isolated way, when what I really want to know is how do the many alternatives available to me at any given time compare.
For example, in the above example I suspect the 10 grams of carbon generated when I do a web search for movie times is an almost negligent amount after I’ve driven my family of four downtown to sit in an air-conditioned theater and spent a ridiculous amount of money on popcorn and candy.
Beyond that, though, it would be interesting to compare the carbon footprint of going to see the movie at the theater, watching the same movie at home on DVD, and watching the same movie at home via Netflix streaming (and what the carbon footprint is for, say, doing each activity once a week for a year).
The article goes on to argue that the real problem is that the Internet runs largely on coal-generated power, but then so does the air conditioned movie theater. I suspect — again I’d like to see these sorts of articles actually cover this — that the Internet is quite efficient given the amount of content it delivers as compared to a movie theater. Lets see a comparison, for example, of total bandwidth delivered by a movie theater over a year compared to its carbon footprint, and compare that with the carbon footprint for delivering the same bandwidth over the Internet.
My intuitions could, of course, be wrong. Maybe I’m saving carbon watching Netflix rather than visiting the movie theater, but maybe that’s offset by the relatively inefficient air conditioning system in my home compared to the movie theater’s. I just don’t know. And niether do the people who write these articles — and that’s a problem.