The not-so-little environmental cost of your streaming habit
• We need to become clear-eyed about the impact of our rampant tech consumption
In my most recent column, as a parting shot I mentioned how Tesla accepting bitcoin as payment for its electric vehicles “is akin to making them coal-powered”. Well, it is a thought that’s been nagging at me since. Most of us know there is an environmental cost baked into our gadgets and software, but it is not as well understood as, say, PET bottles, shopping bags, microplastics or straws. That lack of clarity allows tech consumers and tech companies to get away with the bare minimum of eco responsibility.
There have been campaigns to drive behaviour change for common consumables, but considerably less of a spotlight on tech’s environmental impact. This is why takeaways now feature a soon-to-be-soggy cardboard straw, but most people haven’t given a moment’s thought to the packaging and components a drawer full of tech represents.
Now, put down your beefriendly bazookas please. I concede that shifting something as endemic and entrenched as plastic straw use has broader utility, as, among other things, a symbol of our personal responsibility and willingness to change. We’ve made a mess, and should be doing everything we can to at least reduce our contribution to the plastic-palooza that is modern living.
Still, a straw is a pretty simple thing with an easily mapped supply chain, whereas understanding the environmental impact of a single smartphone is complex. Under that gleaming rectangle is an intricate assembly of copper, nickel, gold, tin and lead, lithium-ion batteries, plastics and magnesium compounds — and that’s all before we talk packaging and logistics.
It’s an easy win for McDonalds or Starbucks to make the straw switch and glean some good public relations from the move. And the boom in personal metallic straws is accepted without a fuss. But activists telling you to skip your next phone upgrade are relegated to nut-job hippie status.
Thankfully, we are starting to get powerful data on the environmental impact of our technologies and lifestyles. The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimates that the cryptocurrency has an annual carbon footprint of 46.76 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, comparable to the whole of Finland.
Other researchers have suggested bitcoin is consuming 50% of the energy used by global data centres. Artificial intelligence technologies are also powerhungry. The deep-learning tool known as GPT-3 reportedly creates a footprint equivalent to driving about 700,000km — and that’s just for a single training session for the model.
It’s not just huge computing rigs at fault. A 2019 report estimated that YouTube’s annual carbon footprint was about 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, about the output of a city the size of Glasgow, and that we could reduce this simply by taking our music without the visuals. In March 2021, Netflix, citing a tool called Dimpact from
the University of Bristol, said it now knows the carbon costs of an hour of streaming. It’s less than 100g of carbon dioxide equivalent, but this would swiftly become an immense number if you consider how many millions of people are streaming content.
The upside is knowledge is power. Netflix said it will use this information to reduce its carbon footprint, joining Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Google, which have recently committed to big carbon reductions and the uptake of renewable energy by 2030.
Dell Technologies has also hung a significant assurance on that year, promising it will reuse or recycle an equivalent product for every one a customer buys.
On the downstream side of Netflix, we can no longer claim
ignorance of the impact of bingeing a series or leaving Friends to stream in the background all day.
Innovation can be a problem, but also sometimes the solution. This is the conundrum the WWF, among others, has argued. Tech takes with one hand (through pollution and depletion of nonrenewable resources) and gives with the other (sensors and assessment tools, electric vehicles, renewable energy).
So what can we really do, and is it even possible to be an ethical tech consumer? We need to be clear-eyed about the environmental impact of rampant tech consumption. As long as we rely on the idea that we can buy a greener tech to fix the problem, we won’t force change.
As University of Melbourne
research fellow Samuel Alexander writes in The Conversation, “sustainability is presented as something we can either purchase as consumers or sell as green entrepreneurs”, which frees us up of the burden of changing anything.
If we’re going to demand individuals take responsibility, we really ought to start with the ultra-rich. A report from the Cambridge Sustainability Commission on “Scaling Behaviour Change”, out this week, finds the wealthiest 5% were behind more than a third (37%) of emissions growth between 1990 and 2015. It calls this crowd the “polluter elite”. So stick that in your straw and tweet it.
THANKFULLY, WE ARE STARTING TO GET POWERFUL DATA ON THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF OUR TECHNOLOGIES AND LIFESTYLES