Digital destruction of the planet

 

For a long time, the idea of ​​a digital industry that was clean because it was "virtual" dominated people's minds. In contrast to the oil and automobile giants, Silicon Valley seemed the natural ally of policy makers to fight against global warming. The massive use of remote working during the Covid crisis has reinforced this belief. However, this illusion is beginning to dissipate. Here is a summary of an article published in Le Monde Diplomatique of October 2021 which reveals the exorbitant environmental cost of the high-tech sector [1].

Digital pollution is colossal

The global digital industry consumes so much water, materials and energy that its footprint is three times that of a country like France or the UK. Digital technologies today consume 10% of the electricity produced in the world (and the main source of energy used to produce electricity is none other than coal!) and reject nearly 4% of global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, i.e. slightly less than double the global civil aviation sector [2].

The door to the Internet

The damage caused to the environment begins with the billions of interfaces (tablets, computers, smartphones, etc.) that open the door to the Internet. It continues with the data that we produce at every moment: transported, stored and processed in vast infrastructures that consume resources and energy. This information will then make it possible to create new digital content for which it will be necessary to have... again, more interfaces! Further, the onset of 5G makes this problem even worse.

« Material Input Per Service Unit » (MIPS)

The “Material Input Per Service unit” (MIPS) is a novel method for calculating the material impact of our consumption patterns. It measures the amount of resources needed to manufacture a product or service [3].

Concretely the MIPS evaluates all the resources mobilized and moved during the manufacture, use and recycling of a garment, a bottle of orange juice, a carpet, a smartphone... And there happens a lot: renewable resources (plants) or not (minerals), ground movements generated by agricultural work, water and chemical products consumed, etc.

We can also measure the MIPS of a service, or of a consumer activity: 1 kilometer by car and one hour of television mobilize respectively 1 and 2 kilograms of resources. A minute on the phone “costs” 200 grams. As for an SMS, it “weighs” 632 grams. As soon as a technology is involved, the MIPS is higher. Digital technologies prove this well, given the large number of metals they contain, especially rare metals that are difficult to extract from the ground. Thus, a 2-kilogram computer mobilizes, among other things, 22 kilograms of chemical products, 240 kilograms of fuel and 1.5 tons of clean water [4]. The MIPS of a television varies from 200 to 1000/1, that is to say: 200 to 1000 grams of resources per gram of finished product. That of a smartphone is 1,200/1 (183 kilograms of raw materials for 150 grams of finished product). But it is the MIPS of an electronic chip that breaks all records: 32 kilograms of material for a 2 gram integrated circuit, i.e. a ratio of 16,000/1! 

Huge data centers and their “redundancy”

The largest data center on the planet is in the city of Langfang in China, an hour's drive south of Beijing. This data center is spread over nearly 600,000 square meters, which is equivalent to 110 football grounds! The consumption of water and electricity by Data centers, needed to cool the machines is growing all the more as service providers do everything they can to avoid what is known in the industry as "complete blackout". It is a kind of a complete breakdown that could be linked to a fault in the electrical supply, a water leak in the air conditioning system, a computer bug, etc. In an increasingly competitive context, many hosting companies are committed to ensuring that their infrastructures operate 99.995% of the time, i.e. only 26 minutes of service unavailability per year. And for this they practice “redundancy”, by building several servers that are often present on different geographical locations belonging to different continents. For example, during a conference given in 2010 Google engineers reportedly explained that Gmail messaging was duplicated six times! The industry is therefore haunted by "zombie servers", as much energy consuming as the others. Some data centers, oversized but underused, can waste up to 90% of the electricity they receive.

An Internet operated by and for Robots

The Internet models a world where human activity in a strict sense is no longer the only one occupying the digital universe. Mike Hazas, professor at the British University of Lancaster confirms, “Computers and objects communicate with each other without human intervention. The production of data is no longer confined to an action on our part” [5].

Today, more than 40% of online activity comes from bots or people paid to generate bogus or misleading messages. Trolls, botnets and spambots send spam, amplify social media rumors or exaggerate the popularity of certain videos. In the financial sector, automated speculation accounts for 70% of global transactions and up to 40% of the value of securities traded. We are shifting from a network used by and for humans to an Internet operated by and even, for machines.

The youngsters and the digital world

Today, a new generation is rising up to “save the planet”. It takes states to tribunal for climate inaction and replants trees. This generation is clearly against plastic, meat consumption and air travel. Yet, it is this young generation that uses e-commerce, virtual reality and “gaming” more than others.

Despite its hazy appearance, the digital domain is paradoxically the one that more than the others, will confront us with the physical and biological limits of our mother earth.

 

[1] https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2021/10/PITRON/63595

[2] « Lean ICT : pour une sobriété numérique », op. cit.

[3] Michael Ritthoff, Holger Rohn et Christa Liedtke, « Calculating MIPS : Resource productivity of products and services » (PDF), Wuppertal Spezial 27e, Institut Wuppertal pour le climat, l’environnement et l’énergie, janvier 2002.

[4] Frédéric Bordage, Aurélie Pontal, Ornella Trudu, « Quelle démarche Green IT pour les grandes entreprises françaises ? » (PDF), étude WeGreen IT réalisée en collaboration avec WWF France, octobre 2018.

[5] Mike Hazas, intervention à la conférence « Drowning in data — digital pollution, green IT, and sustainable access », EuroDIG, Tallinn (Estonie), 7 juin 2017.