TalkClimateChange

As reported in EcoGeek, a triumphant report from the American Consumer Institute estimates that widespread adoption of broadband internet services will reduce carbon emissions by a staggering 1 billion tons during the next ten years.

Reductions will be achieved as follows:

• E-Commerce will reduce emissions by 200 M tons
• Telecommuting will prevent 250 tons of carbon emissions from reduced driving, 30 tons from reduced office construction and 300 tons of energy savings
• Teleconferencing could prevent 200 M tons of carbon emissions (if it replaces 10% of face-to-face meetings.)
• Shifting newspaper from print to digital could save 60 M tons of carbon
• Digitally shipping other goods, such as music, movies and books would also contribute.

Brilliant! Has technology saved the day?

Probably not.

This report neatly proves one of the inconvenient truths of climate change - there is always a myriad of complexity behind the headline, for sadly the report fails to take into consideration the Co2 emissions of:

• The massive energy requirements of hundreds of thousands of data centres which power the internet
• The energy requirements of manufacturing and powering the 1 billion plus PCs in the world today
• The cost of powering accessories such as cable modems and wireless routers, many of which are switched on 24×7
• The Co2 produced by the computer software industry with thousands of offices in which programmers beaver away to produce the software which enables internet applications

If only life were so simple.