By Alex Roslin
The Montreal Gazette
Saturday, June 4, 2011
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 seriously helping to melt some Greenland glaciers.
The Internet has long promised a more efficient and greener world. We save on paper and mailing by sending an email. We can telecommute instead of driving to work. We can have a meeting by teleconference instead of flying to another city.
But all that Googling and Facebooking has spawned mind-boggling amounts of information. If all the data on the Internet was printed in books and stacked, it would stretch from Earth to Pluto 10 times, the Guardian newspaper has reported.
And the stack of books is growing more quickly than NASA’s fastest rocket.
Ironically, despite the web’s green promise, this explosion of data has turned the Internet into one of the planet’s fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. The Internet now consumes two to three per cent of the world’s electricity.
If the Internet was a country, it would be the planet’s fifth-biggest consumer of power, ahead of India and Germany. The Internet’s power needs now rival those of the aviation industry and are expected to nearly double by 2020.
“The Internet pollutes, but people don’t understand why it pollutes. It’s very, very power-hungry, and we have to reduce its carbon footprint,” said Mohamed Cheriet, a green IT expert and professor in the engineering and automation department at Montreal’s École de Technologie Supérieure.
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