Michael Le Page reports on the climate impact of all your computing devices for NewScientist (16 March 2019):
Our tech addiction is cooking the planet. The manufacture and use of smartphones, computers and TVs will produce 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 8 per cent by 2025.
That is the conclusion of a report on the sustainability of the digital technology sector put together by 12 experts for a Paris-based think tank called The Shift Project, which says that energy use in this sector is increasing by 9 per cent every year.
In theory, digital technology could replace other activities that produce even more emissions. For instance, people might be using video conferencing instead of flying to meetings. But this isn’t happening, says Maxime Efoui-Hess, one of the authors of the report.“The ‘good effects’ of digital technologies, in terms of energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions, are constantly neutralised at global scale by the fact that we use these technologies without thinking about the right way to do it,” he says.
And if we fail to make excellent progress replacing fossil fuel power plants with ‘green’ power plants, however you wish to define ‘green’, then that raises the question of how to deal with these power hogs we have on our desk and in our pockets. Will we have rallies where we turn off all the computing devices for a day? A week? A month?
Or will we somehow enforce a ‘tasks suitable for computing’ regimen? No more computer filing, it’s all by hand? Back to Solitaire using real decks? A huge cached server to which you can make a request as to whether “something” has been computed, and get the immediate result back if true, otherwise you compute it and then contribute the result? That last one would present some interesting challenges in terms of problem specification and scalability, but for sufficiently difficult to compute problems, it might be useful.
And the impact on the public computing projects could be enormous. A choice between a better climate and more knowledge? Hard to make a pick. The servers that MUST be up 24 hours could continue to contribute, but everyone else, such as myself? It turns into an interesting question.
