The dirty internet

I’ve read about the “carbon footprint” of the internet before but never saw it quantified until this article in the Guardian. The estimate given is this: 343 million tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere every year for your on-line pleasure. And what does that mean? It’s equal to all the coal, oil and gas burned in Poland for a year. But that doesn’t really help you understand it all, does it?

There’s an effort underway to capture the heat given off in some large data centers.

Take the top link for more information:

it’s interesting to note that 1% is about the same proportion as printing and paper-based publishing represents in the UK. The comparison isn’t entirely valid, for a whole host of reasons, but the fact remains that despite ecological claims for the virtual economy, the digital era may be no less energy-hungry than the paper-based world of 20 years ago. Part of the reason is the so-called rebound effect – the phenomenon that when something (in this case the storing and interrogation of data) becomes cheaper and more energy-efficient, we often end up simply doing more of it, with the result that there is no net reduction, or even a rise, in cost or impact.