Your Computer Is Really Bad For ‘Climate Change’ Or Something

This is the next extension of the Cult of Climastrology scaremongering over the carbon pollution from streaming video

Climate reboot: Are computers among the causes of climate change?

Since the 1970s – the decade that gave us the creation of both Earth Day and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – people have become more mindful of the impact human civilisation is having on the planet.

After all, it’s the only home our civilisation has known and may ever know.

The concept of climate change has grown even hotter this decade, with increased temperatures in many regions and increasing attention on the subject. (snip)

The planet’s hidden killer

What about those phones that we are using to broadcast our climate protest engagement or the social networks we use to promote this activity to our family, friends, and strangers and enlist them in the cause?

These are questions rarely asked and even more rarely answered.

You won’t be gaining a lot of support, especially from the young kids, if you want to take away their smartphones, nor their streaming videos

A recent report in Fortune, however, did provide some kind of answer on the topic.

It found that the music video for Despacito – which became the first video to reach five billion views on YouTube – ended up burning as much energy as 40,000 US homes in a year on its way to five billion streams ‘served’.

This story did not get nearly the attention it should have.

As that Fortune report also pointed out, there is a whole infrastructure of data we take for granted when performing the simplest of internet activity: a typical Google search activates servers in six to eight data centres around the world.

Most of these servers eat up a tonne of energy just so they can stay at a cool enough temperature to remain functional.

When one internet video can potentially do as much damage to our planet as a small city does in a year, perhaps we’re missing a large part of the human-generated climate change equation.

So, what should be done?

Collectively, individual users should start being mindful about their computer use, just as they are about recycling or taking public transport.

However, we can only expect so much of the single consumer.

It is a challenge to the entire computing economy, both producers and consumers, to create a new infrastructure of efficiency that might improve energy usage, computing resources and, ultimately, the carbon footprint created by the industry.

So, who makes this happen? Companies are not going to suddenly change everything voluntarily when it works. But, hey, we can have a conversation

Still, we need to at least start having a conversation about our overreliance on data, at least as much as we talk about our overreliance on oil.