The Planet Needs a New Internet

https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-planet-needs-a-new-internet-1837101745

Maddie Stone
Aug. 20, 2019

When climate change comes for our coffee and our wine, we’ll moan about it on Twitter, read about it on our favorite websites, and watch diverting videos on YouTube to fill the icy hole in our hearts. We’ll do all this until the websites go dark and the networks go down because eventually, climate change will come for our internet, too.

That is, unless we can get the web ready for the coming storms.

Huge changes will be needed because right now, the internet is unsustainable. On the one hand, rising sea levels threaten to swamp the cables and stations that transmit the web to our homes; rising temperatures could make it more costly to run the data centers handling ever-increasing web traffic; wildfires could burn it all down. On the other, all of those data centers, computers, smartphones, and other internet-connected devices take a prodigious amount of energy to build and to run, thus contributing to global warming and hastening our collective demise.

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Anders Andrae, Senior Expert of Life Cycle Assessment at Huawei, told Gizmodo that the internet as a whole—including the energy used to power data centers, networks, and individual devices, as well as the energy used during the manufacturing of those devices—is responsible for about 7 percent of global electricity consumption, with power demands growing at around 8 percent per year. A report the Shift Project published in July found that digital technologies now accounts for 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire aviation sector. And that footprint could double to 8 percent by 2025.

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We can ease up on our social media use. We can think twice before letting that next episode autoplay, or kick it old school and return to broadcast, which Hazas described as “very efficient” compared to streaming. We can make sure to host websites and buy cloud space with companies that have demonstrated a real commitment to clean energy.

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