Even as people the world over symbolically dim lights to fight global warming on Earth Day today, many will join e-mail and social network campaigns that invisibly contribute to climate change.
The 10th edition of Earth Hour, organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and backed by other non-governmental organizations to raise awareness about the threat of climate change, will see landmark monuments — from the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State building to Taipei 101 — go dark at 8:30pm local time.
Individuals are also encouraged to participate and adjust their lifestyles to trim their carbon footprints, thus incrementally reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming.
Biking or car-pooling to work, eating less meat, turning down the thermostat a notch in winter, becoming an “eco-responsible” consumer — these are some of the many ways folks can make a small difference, especially in rich countries with higher per-capita carbon emissions.
However, at the same time, a parallel realm of carbon-polluting activity — ranging from e-mail exchanges to social network chatter to streaming movies on smartphones — has slipped largely unnoticed under the climate change radar.
In isolation, these discrete units of our virtual existence seem weightless and without cost.
A short e-mail, for example, is estimated to add about 4g of carbon dioxide-equivalent into the atmosphere.
By comparison, humanity emits about 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
However, as the digital era deepens, the accumulated volume of virtual messages has become a significant part of humanity’s carbon footprint.
“Electricity consumption related to the growth of digital technologies is exploding,” Alain Anglade of the French Environment and Energy Management Agency said.
In France, it already accounts for more than 10 percent of total electricity use, he said, a percentage that holds for many developed countries.
To see the big picture, it helps to break it down.
Sending five dozen of those 4g e-mails in a day from your smartphone or laptop, for example, is the equivalent of driving an average-size car 1km.
The culprits are greenhouse gases produced in running the computer, server and routers, but also include those emitted when the equipment was manufactured.
Add a 1-megabyte (MB) attachment — a photograph or invitation, say — and the energy consumed would be enough to power a low-wattage lightbulb for two hours.
If that e-mail is sent to a mailing list, multiply by the number of recipients.
E-mail tips for the energy-conscious include avoiding unnecessary recipients, slimming the weight of attachments and emptying your trash box.
Even not being too verbose is helpful — the carbon counter is running as someone reads your long-winded missive about that trip to Disney World.
And then there is spam, the notorious canned ham that became a byword for unsolicited advertising.
Anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc estimated that upward of 60 trillion spams are sent each year, generating the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3 million cars using 7.5 billion liters of gasoline. And the next time you look on Google for “cats that look like Hitler” (536,000 hits), remember this: a Web search on an energy-efficient laptop leaves a footprint of 0.2g of carbon dioxide.
On that clunky desktop, that figure goes up to 4.5g.
Even no-frills SMS text messages — like the tiniest of atoms — are not without mass, each weighing in at about 0.014g of carbon.
And e-readers are not necessarily more eco-friendly than old-fashioned books. It takes about 1kg of carbon equivalent to make an airport paperback, but at least 200 times as much to manufacturer an e-reader.
That means you would need to read no less than 70 books a year for three years on a digital device to be “carbon neutral” compared with a book.
The WWF has “urged its supporters to take a stand for climate action” by massively using Facebook and Twitter.
“Social media knows no physical boundaries and neither does climate change,” Earth Hour initiative executive director Siddarth Das said.
However, it does have a cost, he might add.
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