Pirate's Cove

I’m sure all of you younger climate cultists would be happy to give up all your smartphones, gaming systems, and streaming shows and movies, right? No more videos of everyday life, no more “creating content”, right?

Climate change: Why it could be time to cut back on new gadgets and HD streams

We need to cut global emissions, and fast – and in doing so, tech businesses are both part of the the problem – and the solution. A new report from the UK’s Royal Society finds that as technologies keep growing at pace, the onus is on the digital sector not only to reduce its own carbon footprint, but also to come up with innovative ways to reverse climate change globally.

While there is no exact figure that sums up the impact of digital technologies on the environment, the report estimates that the sector currently represents between 1.4% and 5.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the industry is projected to make huge strides in the coming years: for example, the total number of internet users is expected to reach 5.3 billion by 2023, up from less than four billion in 2018.

All this extra connectivity comes at an environmental cost. The complex infrastructure of cables, fibers, computers, data centers, routers, servers and radio masts that are required to run the digital world need power to be built, and even more so to be used and maintained. Data centers alone accounted for 0.8% of global electricity demand last year.

On a consumer level, the report identified small steps that can be taken to mitigate the impact of new technologies. For example, keeping phones, laptops, tablets or smart TVs for four years can halve the amount of carbon emitted compared to renewing a device every two years. Even better is to purchase second-hand devices; and users should always make sure that they recycle their old phones, which, if kept in a drawer at home, “amount to a form of landfill,” said the researchers.

Similarly, streaming should be done responsibly: the report warned that one hour of streaming on a smartphone generates eight times more emissions in ultra-high definition than it does in standard definition, despite little difference between the two options on a small screen. Turning off the video when listening to YouTube content could equally save between 1% and 5% of the service’s total emissions.

Marching orders, Warmist folks! It’d be funny watching some of these younger folks try and stream in non-HD. They surely have little idea that this is the way things used to be. For all shows and such.

The funny thing is that one has to read the article on the Internet from a site, ZDNet, which reviews and pushes computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, TVs, etc and so on.