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 Snap chat 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 percent 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 percent share of emissions in 2018) and on track to reach automobiles (8 percent), it said.
‘Huge impact’
In February, Greenpeace warned about the concentration of data centers, in particular those used by Amazon, in the US state of Virginia, which reportedly help transmit 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic. To cope with the voracious energy needs, the local power company Dominion turned to non-renewable fuel sources — drawing the ire of tech firms.
Most have pledged to use as much “clean” energy from wind farms or other sources as possible, with Facebook signing a partnership with Greenpeace several years ago. “The idea that the IT sector can help tackle climate change is not a new one — They’ve been talking about it for over ten years, and what we need now to see is action,” said Gary Cook, an IT campaigner at Greenpeace. “Given their rapid growth, decisions about how they get their power become really critical,” he said.
The surge in video and streaming services poses a particular challenge: already in 2017 Greenpeace estimated that the viral K-pop sensation “Gangnam Style”, viewed more than 2.7 billion times, had consumed a year’s worth of production from a small power plant. Video streaming now accounts for nearly 60 percent of all “downstream” internet traffic from servers to individual devices, with Netflix alone generating 15 percent, according to an October report from US network analysis and services group Sand vine. Music services also take a toll. In 2000, researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Oslo found that greenhouse gas emissions from the US music industry alone stood at 157 million kilograms in 2000. But by 2016, even as the use of plastics for CDs and their cases plummeted, the storage and sharing of online music files in the US generated between 200 million and 350 million kilograms of greenhouse emissions.
Recycling costs
Tech executives say they’re taking action to shrink their environmental footprints. Carole Marechal of DATA4, which operates data centers in France, Italy and Luxembourg, said her clients can get real-time readings of how much energy and water they are using, as well as their share of greenhouse gas emissions. “But it’s not limited only to energy consumption,” Marechal said, pointing to the energy and resources required to build digital infrastructures worldwide, and to recycle them. — AFP process of “drive hunting,” whereby fisherman herd dolphins into a cove by beating on boats to disorient them.
The panicked animals can get tangled in nets, suffocate and drown, and can also be injured or killed when they smash into rocks, activists say. Other dolphins are killed when fisherman thrust a long metal rod repeatedly into the body to damage the spinal cord, a practice activists consider excessively cruel. Many in Japan felt the film unfairly targeted the town’s fishing community, but others were horrified by the disturbing footage. The plaintiffs want the governor of Wakayama to revoke a three-year drive hunting permit in Tai Ji. But defenders of the hunt say dolphins have long been a traditional source of meat and call the practice an important part of local culture. They also point out that dolphins are not endangered.
Activists say an increasing number of dolphins are also being trapped and sold live to aquariums as demand rises from China or elsewhere. — AFP
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