Really?
So asserts Mohamed Cheriet of Montreal's Ecole de Technologie Superieure. As quoted last week in the Vancouver Sun, "[T[he Internet pollutes, but people don't understand why it pollutes. It's very, very power-hungry, and we have to reduce its carbon footprint."
Reportedly, “There is increasing concern in environmental circles over the energy demands of the Internet. Green activists point to the growing number of massive and secretive ‘server farms’ that store and transmit data across the system. Each one can have energy demands equal to a small city.”
So, is it time to flip the Internet switch and shut the thing down, darkening the “tubes”?
The UN has already recommended a “carbon footprint” per person that equals about ¼ of the carbon “burden” created by a homeless American. No way that budget allows for emergency systems, phone calls, or health care , much less emails, tweets and “friending.”
Critical thinking and reasoning seem to have been replaced, even by those who were presumably trained better, with outrageous assertions. Say something incendiary and you get attention; be deliberate, rational and analytical and be ignored.
Even the simplest analysis of the argument would lead to an obvious question—even assuming some massive energy use and some level of accompanying pollution: How much pollution do we reduce by using the Internet and what other benefits might using it bring?
The Internet has widely enabled telecommuting. That means fewer urban commuters—and ending the waste of 2.9 billion gallons of fuel idling in traffic, according to some reports. To put that in context, that is roughly enough to fill 58 supertanker ships.
One might also wonder how much energy is not being used because of the Internet.
The point is that these sort of muddled-thinking declarations do very little to illuminate the true and whole story. That thinking has no place in policy statements, much less in science.
(No animals were harmed in the making of this TechByte…only confused political end-goal thinking.)
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Today's TechByte was written by Bartlett D. Cleland, Policy Counsel with the Institute for Policy Innovation.