How Our Online Activities Damage the Environment

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When you text or send emails, you’re contributing to climate change.

Heat-trapping CO2 (carbon dioxide) spews into the atmosphere, increasing global warming. It’s the most plentiful human-made greenhouse gas.

The same goes for your other online activities like video streaming and web surfing. Each creates a “carbon footprint,” some worse than others.

Short emails create about four grams of CO2, the same amount generated by turning on a lightbulb for six minutes, according to digitalcleanupday.org. Sending a text generates about .014 grams, while a long email with an attached photo can generate 50 grams, says palowise.ai.

How do emails and other digital activities generate CO2?

CO2 generation explained

Worldwide, a network of servers in data centers handles our online activities. This network is often called “the cloud.” Servers are souped-up computers, and data centers house hundreds to tens of thousands.

Let’s say you use an online email program like Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook. That means your Inbox and other folders sit on a server (actually, multiple servers for backup purposes). Over time, if you don’t clean out those folders or choose to save additional emails, more storage space is needed. So, more servers are added.

It takes lots of electricity to run and cool servers.

About 80% of the world’s electricity comes from global-warming fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

So, adding servers to data centers, whether for email or other online purposes, likely increases CO2 generation.

In this simplified example, we’ve only considered email storage, not the additional electricity required for writing, sending and receiving emails or the size of emails. All contribute to CO2 production.

Effect of other activities

Cryptocurrency generates a huge amount of CO2. According to digiconomist.net, one Bitcoin transaction is “Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,290,410 VISA transactions or 97,037 hours of watching YouTube.”

According to palowise.ai, signing on to Zoom for one hour generates about 38 times more CO2 than sending a simple email.
The site also notes that watching Netflix for one hour generates about 25 times more CO2 than sending one email.

According to Greenspector, here’s how much CO2 in grams these popular social media platforms emit every minute you use them: TikTok–2.63; Instagram–1.05; Facebook–.79; YouTube–.46. Each Google search emits .2 grams of CO2, according to webfx.com.

“ChatGPT [artificial intelligence] queries require 10 times more electricity than a Google search, due to the electricity consumed by AI data centers,” according to the IMF blog.

How to reduce your carbon footprint

Experts advise:

  • Zoom with only audio turned on – Fast Company magazine reports that Zoom hosts 55 billion hours of meetings annually. If only one quarter were with video turned off, the carbon savings would equate to planting two million trees.
  • According to the same article, streaming video in standard rather than high definition reduces carbon emissions by as much as 86%.
  • Instead of streaming music, download it or play it on CDs, LPs or cassettes.
  • Discard unwanted emails and files on Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, or other cloud depositories you may use.
  • Reduce your monitor brightness from 100% to 70%.
  • Set your computers to sleep mode and turn off unnecessary digital equipment.
  • When emailing, use the “Reply to all” function only when necessary and unsubscribe from unwanted emails. Don’t attach files when you can link to them online.
Photo by Neha Sharma from Pixabay
Keeping digital devices as long as practical helps reduce carbon dioxide. Manufacturing a new iPhone is comparable to driving more than 200 miles, according to grist.org.

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