The Intangible Emitter: How Internet Usage Contributes to Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Over the past 18 months, the world has become more reliant on the internet than ever before. Many students went through the tumultuous virtual school experience for the first time, making up excuses not to turn on their cameras. It turns out that turning off your Zoom camera helps lower CO2 emissions, according to experts. While it may seem like internet usage cannot contribute to CO2 emissions, its surge globally over the past few years, now especially due to the pandemic, has brought an accompanying rise in CO2 emissions. 

At first, linking internet usage to CO2 emissions may seem like an abstract concept, but it is actually quite simple. Every message sent, zoom meeting attended, or search preformed on Google must run through a data center. Data centers are physical buildings containing routers, switches, storage systems, among other components, that process, store, and communicate information for all the actions performed on the internet. These facilities and systems are often massive, requiring vast amounts of electricity, mainly for running servers and cooling and power provision systems. Since the internet is always on, they need to be supplied with power 24/7. The thousands of data centers worldwide collectively use up around 200 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, equivalent to 1% of global energy consumption and about 0.3% of CO2 emissions. However, there is no definitive value due to limited reporting. Some estimates have found this to be as much as 900 billion kilograms of CO2, comparable to the aviation industry. The world will need more data centers with growing data usage, plus more data-intensive technologies like artificial intelligence becoming more widespread. Further, data centers require large amounts of water to generate electricity and cool down servers and other components. The typical data center uses a staggering 3-5 million gallons of water per day. According to a study from January of this year, in early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic led to a spike in internet usage that required 42.6 million megawatt-hours of additional electricity to support the operations of data centers. It also projects that globally these facilities could produce 34.3 million more tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases and use up over 2 billion gallons of water if the digital lifestyle initiated by the pandemic continues. 

Only some companies, including Google, Apple, and Facebook, disclose the energy consumption of their data centers. These giant companies are the largest purchasers of renewable energy, and many have goals of powering their data centers exclusively with renewable energy. These goals display a positive trend of moving towards powering some of the world's largest data centers with renewable energy. According to a survey, data center professionals believe that "13% of data center power would come from solar and 8% from wind - amounting to about one in every five kilowatt-hours coming from the two renewable sources" by 2025. More efficient processors at data facilities have also proven to help with cutting down emissions. However, currently, while many companies claim to power their data centers using renewable energy, it has been found that their facilities are still primarily powered by fossil fuels in many parts of the world. 

Over 50% of the world's population are active internet users, performing daily activities like sending emails, texting, and posting on social media. A regular email produces 4 grams of CO2, and simply adding an image to the email sends this value up to 50 grams. Taking minimal actions like sending one less email could collectively have an impact. According to the energy company OVO in an article, "if every adult in the UK sent one less 'thank you' email, it could save 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year" (16,433 UK tonnes is roughly 18,114 US tones). Further, another study in an article found that "if 70 million streaming subscribers lowered the quality of their video, it could reduce monthly greenhouse gas emissions by up to 3.5 million tons." So while each of our online activities has a minimal carbon footprint on its own, they can add up on a larger scale. At the same time, though, an increase in environmentally conscious online actions can lead to an impact in the right direction.


Images (in order):
https://iristech.co/internet-usage-statistics/https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-really
https://cds.cern.ch/record/2127440https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/drought-stricken-communities-push-back-against-data-centers-n1271344
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-spend-11-billion-new-data-centers-netherlands
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think

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