Tag: internet

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & EnergyTags , , ,

Are your internet habits killing the planet?

Arielle Samuelson, HEATED

The internet is quickly becoming a major contributor to climate change. Here’s how to understand the problem—and what can be done to fix it.

This weekend I binged Bridgerton, Netflix’s raunchy, Regency-ish romcom. Along with 45 million other people, I tuned in to find out if incisive, socially-awkward gossip columnist Penelope Featherington could win the heart of her lovable, pirate cosplaying neighbor.

But as I was watching, I had a nagging feeling. Because lately, I’ve been reading a lot about how the internet contributes to the climate crisis. And I’ve learned that the web pollutes more than I ever would have guessed.

Everything we do online has an environmental impact, just like the clothes we buy, the food we eat, and the way we travel. But unlike fashion, burgers, and cars, you can’t touch the internet: it seems to exist in an abstract, disembodied place beyond the physical world.

But the internet is physical. It exists in fiber optic cables, cell towers, transformers, and especially data centers: huge concrete buildings housing tens of thousands of computer servers cooled by trillions of liters of water. And data centers require a constant supply of electricity.

Read more at https://heated.world/p/are-your-internet-habits-killing

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, Sustainable LivingTags , ,

Dirty data: Firms count environmental costs of digital planet

THE STAR ONLINE

Technology is often touted as a solution to the world’s environmental challenges, but it is also part of the problem: industry executives are facing rising pressure to clean up their energy and resource-intensive business.

How much energy, for example, does it take to send a one-megabyte email?

Around 25 watts per hour, representing 20g of carbon dioxide emissions, according to France’s CNRS research centre.

It might not seem like much, but the Radicati research group expects 293 billion emails will be sent every single day this year and the power needs to be generated – mostly from fossil fuels.

Apps can quickly drain and shorten the life of phone batteries, with Snapchat a particularly “heavy” messaging service because it automatically turns on the camera.

Then there are the server farms crunching mammoth amounts of data worldwide, which require huge amounts of electricity both to run and to power air conditioning which keeps the equipment from getting too hot.

“Under the current global energy mix, the share of greenhouse gas emissions from information and communication technologies will rise from 2.5% in 2013 to four percent in 2020,” the French think-tank Shift Project said in a recent report.

That makes the sector more carbon-intensive than civil aviation (a 2% share of emissions in 2018) and on track to reach automobiles (8%), it said.

Read more at https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2019/05/22/dirty-data-firms-count-environmental-costs-of-digital-planet/

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, Sustainable LivingTags , , ,

Over 4,200 Amazon workers push for climate change action, including cutting some ties to big oil

Karen Weise, THE NEW YORK TIMES

SEATTLE — Employees at big tech companies have pushed back against their employers for working with the military and law enforcement offices, and demanded better treatment of women and minorities.

Now, thousands of them are also taking on climate change.

This week, more than 4,200 Amazon employees called on the company to rethink how it addresses and contributes to a warming planet. The action is the largest employee-driven movement on climate change to take place in the influential tech industry.

The workers say the company needs to make firm commitments to reduce its carbon footprint across its vast operations, not make piecemeal or vague announcements. And they say that Amazon should stop offering custom cloud-computing services that help the oil and gas industry find and extract more fossil fuels.

The goal for Amazon’s leaders and employees is “that climate change is something they think about whenever a business decision is being made,” said Rajit Iftikhar, a software engineer in Amazon’s retail business. “We want to make Amazon a better company. It is a natural extension of that.”

The letter adds support for a new tactic among activist tech workers: using the stock they receive as compensation to agitate for change. Like other shareholders, they can file a resolution urging a particular corporate change that investors vote on at a company’s annual meeting. Historically, this approach has been used by outside activist investors, not employees.

The Amazon employees signing the letter, who made their names public, are pushing Amazon to approve a shareholder resolution that would force the company to develop a plan to address its carbon footprint. The resolution was filed by more than two dozen current and former employees late last year, and it could come up for a vote next month.

Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/technology/amazon-climate-change-letter.html