"We're consuming much more data than we used to for not that much more energy," said Masanet, the paper's lead author. Since 2010, such data crunching has jumped more than fivefold, while energy use rose only about 6%, according to a paper published this year in Science. Over the past decade, data centers - often called the "brains" of the digital world - have massively increased the amount of information they process while increasing energy use only a little. The silver lining is that, at least for now, the energy impact of cloud computing remains relatively modest. "If we want to change things, there is no alternative to us reviewing the way we use digital." Big data gets bigger "The only chance to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees is to divide by two the greenhouse gas emissions in the next 10 years," Ferreboeuf said. The Shift Project issued an alarming report last year that found digital technologies' energy demand was growing at an unsustainable rate. But the relatively lower impact of Netflix binging and many other digital activities doesn't mean we're in the clear. On one hand, the massive drop in car traffic from staying-in-place orders across the country is "a slam-dunk" environmentally, said Eric Masanet, a professor of sustainability sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara. By some estimates, data centers and the networks that connect them produce as much carbon pollution as the aviation industry- or about 2% of the world's total. Yet the growing ranks of workers now plying their trade online using tools like Zoom and Slack are taking their own toll.Įnvironmentalists note that the technological infrastructure that supports our online video watching, searching and music playing leaves a large carbon footprint of its own. The millions of Americans who are skipping their morning commute and working from home because of the coronavirus have drastically reduced smog over America's largest cities and otherwise benefited the environment.
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