Everything that is done digitally uses energy and therefore emits CO2 and contributes to climate change. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the creators of the Internet, calculated that with email alone, average users with office work end up generating about 135 kilos of carbon dioxide per year. Pablo Foncillas offers in this chapter a solution to reduce this environmental impact.
The more data the servers that manage the internet have to process, the more energy they need to consume. Also, these machines are installed in large buildings full of processors that get very hot, so they have to be cooled. Therefore, between the electricity itself to function and the electricity needed to cool, they end up spending large amounts of energy and, therefore, emitting a lot of CO2.
According to The Shift Project, a French NGO, 20% of the data processed in 2018 was generated by e-mails, WhatsApp-type instant messages or web pages. The remaining 80% were in video format, including streaming television, video calls, telemedicine and online videos. In 2018, online videos produced 300 million tons of CO2, more than what Spain emitted the same year.
Since 2010, Internet traffic has multiplied by 16.9%, a cumulative increase of 33% per year. However, the energy consumption of data centers has only multiplied by 1.1, less than 1% of the annual growth, a figure that Foncillas considers positive. Regarding users, the energy company OVO calculated that if each adult sent one less “thank you” message per year, it could save, in Spain alone, the CO2 equivalent to that emitted by 2,350 cars. Not sending that email is the “turn off the tap when you're brushing your teeth” adapted to digital.
