Some figures about IT and the environment

• Electronic devices and other IT related activity represent 4% of the total global carbon footprint, a figure that is growing every year due to sector growth.
• If the proportion may look small, it actually is important regarding other industry sectors; automobile sector, known for its pollution side effects, in its whole is for example estimated weighting roughly 6 to 9% of global carbon emissions. The entiere plane fleet is 2%.
• A computer (laptop or desktop) will during the course of its life emit a bit less than 100kg of CO2 eq. per year, cost which is between 70-90% manufacturing carbon footprint and the remaining in electricity costs.
• Among e-waste, monitors represent a significant volume. E-waste is difficult to recycle, and may under some circumstances become an environmental hazard.

Misconceptions around green IT

Latest model efficiency compensates for replacement

This is trivially wrong based on the above facts. Even 10 years ago, e-devices were for most part energetically sober. However, their manufacturing and disposal are polluting processes. Besides, unlike it could be the case for a car, having more efficiency at hand does not necessarily result in less consumption. If anything, more powerful model create new uses, creating more consumption.

Some programming languages are less green than others

Some people pointed out because Python is several dozen times less efficient than C, it is dozen times less green than C. While not completely wrong, this is simplistic.

It’s only measuring runtime power consumption. Programs written in Python could take less time to write, thus possibly compensating. Resources on server side are rarely optimised below a certain threshold, so if two programs take one same vps instance, they are polluting the same. Finally, providing services more efficiently power-wise might not decrease overall consuption for tech, if it drives price down it may in turn increase demand.

We need to sober up on emails

This is among all conceptions I heard one of the most strange. SMTP traffic is perhaps 1% of the world’s internet traffic. A mail is a few KB. A single video on yt will be thousands of times more costy. Yet, this is a misconception I often have seen vehiculed by some corporations, encouraging their employees to “green gestures” such as deleting their email. But that’s misleading, as its not even a drop in the ocean

Positively changing actions

Over the last few years, there have been a massive shift in our usage of digital devices.

• We use videos a ton, for everything
• We spend a lot more time gaming
• We get helped more and more by new content generators and smart assistants

These 3 usages are heavily impacting traffic and waste, each in a different manner:

• Netflix, YouTube, Tiktok, Amazon prime, Disney +, cumulate almost 40% of the global internet traffic, with massive repercussions on the usage of servers, routers etc. since video content is heavy
• Gaming represent a fair portion of traffic, but more importantly have become an increasingly common reason to renew hardware for more powerful versions
• Content generators are sober on their apparent side, but bots like ChatGpt requires absolutely massive backend infrastructure to ingest and process a lot of data. No less than 240 CO2 tons (500 computer manufacturing equivalent) are thrown every year in the training of the artificial intelligence. And this is becoming ordinary business…

Conclusion

Concerns about electronic pollution is legitimate. But it would be foolish to believe we could stop it by writing more efficient programs. We however can take responsibility in reducing the entertainment usage of the digital tool, and use data-hungry AI models with measure.