Whenever I talk about greening the internet and reducing carbon emissions from websites, people usually give me a blank stare and ask, “Do websites produce carbon emissions?”
We tend to think of the internet as clean and immaterial. There has been a strong desire to bring services online, not only to improve efficiency and user experience, but also to reduce resource consumption and environmental impact. However, there is a growing body of evidence that the internet has a real environmental impact , even if we can’t see it.
The internet’s energy consumption and emissions
are enormous. Electricity is the lifeblood of the internet, and it is used to power data centres, telecommunications networks and the devices canada email list Websites Carbon-Free we use to browse the web. In total, the global internet uses more electricity than the UK ( 416.2 terawatt hours of electricity per year, to be precise).
This ends up being a lot of carbon emissions. In fact, 2% of global carbon emissions come from the electricity used to power the internet, such as the data centers used by large corporations. This is equivalent to the amount of carbon emitted by the global aviation industry, which many think is one of the most polluting industries. To put this into perspective, if the internet were a country, it would be the sixth most polluting country in the ventilation solutions world, equivalent to Germany
Unlike many other industries that are looking
for efficiency and reducing emissions, internet emissions are expected to grow in the coming years. The number of people with internet access in the world is growing, and data is getting faster and cheaper – we are all consuming more. Streaming services such as YouTube , Netflix and Spotify are big data users and growing, but even ordinary cyprus business directory websites are becoming bigger data consumers.
According to HTTPArchive.org , the average website today is four times larger than it was in 2010 and growing
As a result, it is estimated that the Internet could grow to produce 3.5% of the world’s carbon emissions within the next 10 years, at a time Websites Carbon-Free when all industries will have to stop producing so many emissions.
The urgency has been highlighted by Thomas Stocker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists and a former leader of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has stated: