Green groups
around the world are turning to social networking to drive their campaign for
Earth Hour on Saturday, when lights are turned off for an hour to signal
concern about global warming.
But here's the irony.
With every e-mail, every tweet, every appeal watched on YouTube or
'liked' on Facebook, environmentalists are stoking the very problem they want
to resolve.
Each time we network, we emit carbon dioxide (CO2) through the fossil
fuels which are burned to power our computers and the servers and databanks
that store or relay our message.
That poses a small dilemma for the Australian-led campaign for
Saturday's switch-off.
In 130 countries around the world, people are being urged to turn off
the lights for one hour at 8.30pm local time as a show of concern about climate
change.
In e-mails alone, the typical office worker is responsible for 13.6
tonnes of CO2 or its equivalent per year, a French government agency for energy
efficiency, ADEME, calculated last year.
That figure is based on a French company of 100 people who work 220
days a year and each receive 58 mails a day and send 33 per day, with an
average mail size of 1MB.
By comparison, 13.6 tonnes is more than twice the annual CO2 emissions
per capita in France and almost two-thirds of the average annual emissions per
capita in the US.
The more people you CC and the bigger the mail, the greater the carbon
emissions, ADEME said.
'Just a 10-per cent reduction in the number of mails that are sent
which include the boss and one of his colleagues leads to a gain of one tonne,
the equivalent of a round-trip flight from Paris to New York,' it said.
Facebook and Twitter say they are striving to keep their carbon
footprint as small as possible.
Facebook, which claims 800 million users worldwide, is building a
massive data centre - its third globally and first in Europe - in the Swedish
town of Luleaa, near the Arctic Circle.
The local chill helps cool servers, rather than using air conditioning
to do so, and the town gets clean energy from hydro.
Greenpeace had mustered a 700,000-signature demand for a 'greener'
Facebook under its so-called Unfriend Coal campaign.
At a talk last year that he posted on the Internet, Raffi Krikorian, a
director for infrastructure at Twitter, said the company contributed around
0.02 grammes of CO2 to the atmosphere with each 140-character tweet.
'But at 50 million tweets, that's one metric tonne of CO2 a day,' he
observed. 'We can do better. We are making our stuff a lot more efficient, and
that will get (our carbon emissions) a lot further down.'
Just how climate-damaging is the Internet? By comparison with other
sectors, not very - and it can be argued that the Internet saves carbon which
would otherwise be emitted in snail mail, phone calls or travel to face-to-face
meetings.
A 2007 estimate by Gartner Inc, an international consulting firm, found
the information and communications technology industry was sharply increasing
its CO2 emissions in absolute terms but still accounted for only around two per
cent of the global total.
This is less than a sixth of emissions from either transport, industry
or agriculture.
Mr Andy Ridley, Earth Hour's executive director, said his organisation
invested in offsets - projects that mitigate carbon emissions - to compensate
for its own fossil-fuel pollution.
It was also using an intranet social platform called Yammer to cut down
on internal e-mails.
'It has revolutionised how we communicate and very significantly cut
the amount of electronic traffic,' Mr Ridley told AFP.
'Overall, we think that our ability to build a campaign digitally, and
to engage with people across the planet in a way that minimises travel, is one
of the great advantages of technology.'
AFP
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