Online video viewing was responsible for carbon emissions equal to those of Spain last year, and it’s time to take seriously the impacts and become “digitally sober,” according to researchers at a Paris-based think tank on climate change.
The new takeaways from The Shift Project follow on the findings of a March 2019 report that pleads for people to curb their production and use of online video, as well as other digital technologies. The report authors want people to question their own tech habits and understand they have “invisible” but real material costs, while at the same time protecting the most valuable contributions of an IT sector that’s generating more carbon every year.
The latest Shift Project report, led by Maxime Efoui-Hess, zooms in on the energy needed to support the networks that deliver video to our devices. The energy demand for digital technologies overall now accounts for 4 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the civil aviation sector. Demand is growing by 9 percent annually and could equal the carbon impact of cars by 2025, unless we change course on both digital production and end-user consumption, the report authors said.
Just as there is a growing number of voices calling on people to fly less – even Dutch airline KLM recently made headlines for supporting the trend – so too are we now being encouraged to use our tech less or at least in mindful ways, and consider our wasteful and unnecessary video habits. More than half of the energy impacts come from networks and data centers that are linked to use rather than production of video. All of that surfing YouTube and binge-watching on Netflix adds up with costs that are embedded.
“The rapid growth in the total volume of data – thus of energy consumption and its associated greenhouse emissions – is to a great extent due to video,” said the report. “This evolution runs counter to the objectives of the Paris Agreement.”
Video accounted for 60 percent of world data flows in 2018, and a third of that came from video on demand services such as Amazon Prime. Porn came next, with about 27 percent of the usage coming from site-hosted streaming video, which also means it alone accounts for 5 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the digital technology sector.
Videos available from YouTube and a handful of small players in the “tube” market accounted for 21 percent of the traffic while all videos from other sources like Facebook accounted for the remaining 18 percent.
And if you’re interested in knowing about your own impacts, The Shift Project has created a new browser extension that will help you to “see” the impacts and be motivated to act by that new visibility.
“From the standpoint of climate change and other planetary boundaries, it is not a question of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ pornography, telemedicine, Netflix or emails: the challenge is to avoid a use deemed precious from being impaired by the excessive consumption of another use deemed less essential,” the report said.
“This makes it a societal choice, to be arbitrated collectively to avoid the imposition of constraints on our uses against our will and at our expense. In the 21st century, not choosing is no longer a viable option.”
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