Text is the most environmentally friendly form of communication. 1,000 words of text weighs about 7 KB and takes up about two A4 pages. Two A4 pages with images could easily weigh 100 KB, and that’s for well-optimized images. Poorly optimized images weigh in the megabytes. We’ve been analyzing a lot of Web images recently… Read More »
(Long read) Half of the roughly 13 trillion photos taken since 1900 were shot in the last five years. In fact, more photos were taken in 2020 than in the entire twentieth century. Digital is the great accelerator. Digital puts everything on speed: extraction, production, consumption, waste generation. Digital is physical. Data consumes electricity. Data… Read More »
The Website Carbon Calculator is a real go-to tool for me when I want to find out how much CO2 a particular Web page is creating. This, and many other great initiatives, comes from Wholegrain Digital, a company founded by Vineeta and Tom Greenwood in 2007. Tom has recently published an excellent book, Sustainable Web… Read More »
We’ve been developing a survey to identify wasteful digital behavior. About 180 people completed a test version. There follows a highlight of the most interesting results. 60% of respondents said that it was not easy to find content and other information on their organization’s intranet or other internal systems. When we asked if they felt… Read More »
According to “The Cost of Music,” a joint study penned by the University of Glasgow and the University of Oslo, greenhouse gases were recorded at 140-million kilograms in 1977 for music production activities (vinyl; plastic packaging). Moreover, they were at 136 million kilograms in 1988 and 157 million in 2000. In 2016, the age of… Read More »
On multiple levels, ‘green’, ‘renewable’ energy dams devastate freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. “While they account for less than 1 percent of the Earth’s surface, freshwater ecosystems are home to more than 10 percent of all species,” Josh Klemm and Eugene Simonov wrote for International Rivers. “Hydropower dams are a key culprit in the rapid 84… Read More »
Yet we can’t escape the hype. It seems like almost every day we hear a story about how ‘cheap’ hydro, wind, solar and biomass have delivered 50%, 70%, 100% of electricity demand. It sounds amazing, like the energy problem is almost solved if we only believe a little more in these new magic technologies. There’s… Read More »
For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for our environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more power than all… Read More »
Using a slew of aliases to buy land and make sweet deals, getting secret, historic tax breaks, getting electricity at less than half of what ordinary people pay, being sold public land for less than half the market value, slurping down the cheapest of cheap water like there’s no tomorrow, this is how Big Tech… Read More »
In so many ways, data center water use is more intensive than the way an ordinary person uses water, as Shaolei Ren explained to Reece Rogers for Wired: “The water that is available for people to use is very limited. It’s just the fresh surface water and groundwater. Those data centers, they’re just evaporating water… Read More »