{"id":18637,"date":"2021-01-28T11:15:46","date_gmt":"2021-01-28T11:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grist.org\/?p=497602"},"modified":"2021-01-28T11:15:46","modified_gmt":"2021-01-28T11:15:46","slug":"alright-someone-had-to-say-it-is-it-time-to-get-rid-of-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/28\/alright-someone-had-to-say-it-is-it-time-to-get-rid-of-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Alright, someone had to say it: Is it time to get rid of the internet?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q.<\/span> Dear Umbra,<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cloud computing is a major emissions producer. Why is no one arguing for the dismantling of the Internet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014 Not Everyone\u2019s Online<\/strong><\/p>\n

A.<\/span> Dear NEO,<\/p>\n

I\u2019d venture to say that many, many people have a very love-hate relationship with the internet. It\u2019s a source of connection, but also one of stress. It facilitates convenience, but at the same time seems to suck all manner of time and energy out of the day in an anxiety-inducing spiral. It has an appetite for massive amounts of energy, but it simultaneously has all the makings of a powerful, intangible force to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with some of the internet\u2019s climate-specific pros and cons. On the plus side, the creation of \u201cremote work\u201d has eliminated a lot of commute-related emissions, which make up a significant part of the average person\u2019s carbon footprint. There\u2019s also the overall convenience factor. A lot of tasks are so much easier <\/em>online — bank deposits, grocery shopping, even paying the electric bill — saving any number of car trips in favor of more efficient delivery systems<\/a>. And then there\u2019s the fact that the World Wide Web\u2019s wild and crazy information highway means that anyone with a Wi-fi signal can learn about climate change, from the latest U.N. environmental report to the daily atmospheric carbon level.<\/p>\n

But, as you suggest, all that good might not be enough to offset the internet\u2019s current climate drawbacks. A 2020 review of teleworking studies found the net energy benefit of remote work to be rather small<\/a> when weighed against the environmental impact of all the infrastructure and energy that goes into data centers — the millions of servers that must be built, powered, and cooled to enable your Google searches, Zoom calls, and Instagram posts. The \u201ccloud,\u201d in fact, is actually just a system of data centers sprinkled all over the world that hold digital assets so you don\u2019t have to keep them on your hard drive. One estimate of all that energy usage adds up to about 73 billion kWh, still just 2 percent of the total U.S. power demand in 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The energy used by the internet is hardly its only potential climate cost. From a social standpoint, the internet\u2019s quick connections may have given us a warped sense of time and space, normalizing (for those of a certain privileged demographic) certain forms of very carbon-intensive travel — weekend flights to Mexico from Pittsburgh for a BFF getaway, international business trips for a 30-minute speaking engagement. Online shopping is its own particular carbon conundrum: The fact that so many objects are incredibly easy to buy has given way to the rise of unconscious consumption, an undeniable propagator of polluting industries. And that\u2019s not even getting into influencer culture, an entire industry built around filtered 21-year-olds selling you supplement subscriptions you have never and will never need.<\/p>\n

And as for the internet\u2019s wealth of information? Well, the same search engines that can find you the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also make it perilously easy to find yahoos claiming that global warming is an invention of the government. And that\u2019s to say nothing of the nightmarish online news cycle<\/a> or the dark web-fueled rise of hate groups and conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

Well, yikes. Things are not looking so good in the \u201creasons we should keep the internet\u201d category. But a lot of this calculation has to do with the way the internet is currently used and powered. Back to the whole cloud computing example: The carbon impact of a giant army of servers is closely tied to the source of the electricity itself; it could remain the \u201clargest coal-powered machine on the planet,\u201d as The New Republic <\/em>rather doomily deemed it<\/a> in 2019, or it could be powered by cleaner solar, wind, or nuclear power.<\/p>\n

Despite the explosive growth of cloud computing and proliferation of server farms, various technological advances are converging to keep total energy usage fairly stable. In 2016, an analysis commissioned by the Department of Energy<\/a> found that cloud computing\u2019s energy needs were far less than had been estimated by previous growth projections because server technology had become more efficient. For example, we\u2019re benefiting from the advent of something called \u201chyperscale\u201d server farms<\/a>, which pile a ton of bare-bones servers together. By cutting out unnecessary, energy-sucking functions from the hardware, each unit requires a smaller amount of energy. One Google data center is even experimenting with using its server farm as a battery<\/a> that can discharge into the electric grid around it, acting as a source of community energy.<\/p>\n

All that said: The internet is only expected to grow more, and to grow faster. It\u2019s hard to predict how any efficiency advances can keep up with it.<\/p>\n

But at the risk of sounding naively optimistic, I\u2019ll say this for the internet age: Communication is a billion times easier than it was 100 years ago. Young people in particular, aka those who stand to lose the most from a warmer atmosphere, have a platform to organize around climate change on a larger scale than they would have in, like, 1901. There\u2019s even been evidence of what some people are calling a \u201cGreta Thunberg effect,\u201d<\/a> in which people who have been exposed to her passionate pro-planet messages online are more likely to take action on climate change.<\/p>\n

You can wring your hands and say, \u201cBut maybe all the problems those young people have to undo would never have come about if the internet had never existed!\u201d Sure, that is an interesting thought experiment, and there is a whole school of climate activists who long to return to a very old-school agrarian society in the name of shrinking carbon footprints. But let\u2019s be real: The horse has long since bolted from that proverbial stable. The internet and its comforts are simply too embedded into everything that we do; once you have experienced the joys of online curry delivery, you will probably not be eager to go out and slaughter a goat for dinner. Even if extremists were to destroy every server farm in the world in the name of dismantling the internet, there would almost certainly be a major movement to bring it back as fast as possible.<\/p>\n

So rather than spend your energy trying to dismantle the Internet altogether — and probably making a lot of people really mad at you — push for ways to change for the better. We can have an internet that is both powered by greener energy and doesn\u2019t perpetuate misinformation, hateful rhetoric, and apathy. In fact, I\u2019d go so far as to say we deserve it.<\/p>\n

Virtually,<\/p>\n

Umbra<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline Alright, someone had to say it: Is it time to get rid of the internet?<\/a> on Jan 28, 2021.<\/p>\n

This post was originally published on Grist<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s address the carbon footprint of our most fundamental online relationship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[395,331],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18637"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18638,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18637\/revisions\/18638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}