FUTURE PROOF
Love putting stuff up on the cloud? It might be poisonous, says Paul Horrell...
Cars are an environmental catastrophe, and it’s perfectly justified that governments act to quell their impact, especially (but not solely) for their effects on the climate emergency. But making cars sustainable will in no way secure the future of our home planet. Not on its own. Other industries have huge impacts and seem to be getting away with it.
It’s our job as citizens to hold those industries to account, by voting for regulation and if necessary by withdrawing our custom. In short, buy less stuff that does bad things. We’re endlessly reminded, and rightly, about single-use plastic and fast fashion. Other offenders are more hidden.
IT is one. Data, and its transmission and the server farms in which it resides, has a colossal impact. Add up the global total, and they use about twice the electricity of the whole UK. Only a small proportion of that electricity is renewable – some companies, including Google and Apple, but not Amazon, claim all their servers are renewably supplied, or carbon-offset. In CO2 footprint, data centres are overtaking the whole aviation industry – another gross climate actor, partly because by nature it evades national jurisdiction. And yes, I know that doing this job takes me abroad a lot and makes me a frequent-flier hypocrite.
People say the use of electric cars will stress up the grid, but actually our present grid can cope with a large-scale switch to EVs. Yet in some countries the server farms will eat the grid unless something changes soon. More than one reputable study has predicted that computing and comms, including mobile data transmission, and all your internet of things, will be responsible for up to a fifth of global electricity use by 2025.
Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned cryptocurrency mining. (Not going to explain what it is here. No room, and don’t really understand myself, actually.) This depends on the value of the currencies themselves, but at the moment the mining of it uses more juice than New Zealand.
Then there’s your devices. There’s an argument for buying an efficient new car because cars use far more energy in their lifetime than they do in their production, so saving energy while driving represents the big win. And incidentally renewable generation is growing, so an EV gets cleaner over time. But for a phone, manufacturing is by far the most resource- and energy-intensive phase. We’re encouraged to bin them every couple of years. They’re hardly ever recycled. So get a new battery when it bricks, don’t get a new phone.
Mine, like my fashion and my food, is slow: an elderly iPhone SE. But, hey, it does pretty well everything the new ones do, and it’s handily compact. I’d probably still be on my seven-year-old iPhone 5, but it drowned. I was cycling along the towpath to a job, hit an obstacle and careered into the canal. The job was to test Nissan’s autonomous electric prototype. Canal, bicycle, EV: a friend of mine called it the most Islington accident in history.
“IN CARBON FOOTPRINT, DATA CENTRES ARE OVERTAKING THE WHOLE AVIATION INDUSTRY”