ecologies

This page considers the ecological impact of the internet and the 'information economy', exploring claims that digital is necessarily greener and cleaner.

It covers -

• Introduction – questions about ideologies, expectations and uncertainties in exploring the environmental impact of the net
• Energy - conflicting claims about whether a wired economy necessarily uses (or merely wastes) less energy
• Dematerialisation – does virtuality and disintermediation involve a reduction in energy and material use
• Mobility and clustering – digital nomads, congestion pricing, dot-com clustering and other geospatial issues
• Waste – packaging, consumption and 'e-waste'
• Displacement – offshoring pollution along with production?
• Studies – major works on the internet, digital economy and environment

     Introduction

For enthusiasts one reason for the 'newness' of the 'new economy' is that it is supposedly cleaner and greener than superseded smokestack or rustbelt economies, with greater uptake of digital technologies being associated with a significantly reduced impact on local and global ecologies. The vision is one of the machine in the garden, far far from the madding crowds, toxic waste dumps or ugly smokestacks … a post-industrial collage of Bambi meets the iPod, telework and responsible consumption by enlightened consumers.

Others have expressed alarm about the energy requirements of the digital economy, with claims that the proliferation of online devices has "staggering implications for the thermoelectrical power complex" and that for example around 50% of US electricity production will be consumed by "the Internet and E-commerce activity". One example of those alarms is The Internet Begins With Coal: A Preliminary Exploration of the Impact of the Internet on Electricity Consumption, a 1999 study by Mark Mills for the Greening Earth Society (a US utilities advocacy organisation).

Alas, the evidence for many claims is problematical. There is considerable uncertainty about the local/global environmental impact of the net, with benefits apparently often being offset by disadvantages and the significance of particular problems being overstated by some champions.

     Energy

How much energy is used to run the internet (cables, servers, personal computers, other devices) and more broadly power "the internet economy"? What is the rate of growth?

The answers to those questions are unclear; as we have indicated in highlighting some studies below there is major disagreement about base data and projections. Although devices are broadly becoming more efficient, there are more of them. It is sometimes claimed that PDAs and similar devices are innately 'green' because they are not drawing power from a grid or generating thermal pollution. However, an assessment of their overall impact might include costs involved in battery production.

What is the impact of the domestic personal computer and non-commercial uses such as burning CDs of fileshared music? There are few comprehensive audits. Electricity use in an average Australian household as of 2001 is claimed to be -

use water heating fridge/freezer air heating/cooling lighting audio/video cooking washing and ironing pool pump other

% 33 20 14 8 7 6 3 3 6

Adding an internet fridge or two is unlikely to have a fundamental impact.

Some analysts have suggested that much of the energy used by server farms or web hotels is attributable to the cooling requirements of those facilities, rather than power to keep the hard drives spinning. Jennifer Mitchell-Jackson suggests that server farms across the US used no more than 0.12% of all US electric power at the end of 2000, in contrast to claims that the growth of server farms in and around Seattle would require around 1,100 megawatts a day (roughly the amount of power used by the entire city, including manufacturers such as Boeing).

The experience of Seattle - and other hubs such as New York, where a projected farm was claimed to have double the power requirements of the former World Trade Center towers - is not typical of most of the US or other parts of the world. That is demonstrated in Matthew Zook's 1998 paper on The Web of Consumption: The Spatial Organization of the Internet Industry in the US - illustrating how supposedly 'spaceless' new economy industries cluster in specific locations - and Manuel Castells' The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring & the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell 1989).

     Studies

'Big picture' perspectives are provided by Bjorn Lomborg's controversial The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) and Global Crisis, Global Solutions (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2004) and by Jeremy Leggett's The Carbon War: Dispatches from the End of the Oil Era (London: Allen Lane 1999).

The landmark 1999 The Internet & Global Warming report by Joseph Romm, Arthur Rosenfeld & Susan Herrmann of the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions claimed economic growth of 8% in the US during 1997-98 and noted that energy consumption grew by only 1% rather than the expected 10%. That difference was attributed to the new economy and has been the basis of claims that 'being online' will result in substantial systemic reductions in energy demand.

Jay Hakes' lucid 2000 The Potential Impacts of Computers and the Internet on Electricity Consumption disagreed, attributing lower demand in 1997-98 to an unusually mild winter and commenting sensibly that

it is too soon to come to any conclusions as to the precise path of electricity use resulting from internet and internet-based commerce.

As noted above, the 1999 The Internet Begins with Coal: A Preliminary Exploration of the Impact of the Internet on Electricity Consumption report by Mark Mills - echoed in a Forbes polemic by Mills and Peter Huber - estimated "internet related" electricity use at around 8% of all US electricity use in 1998 and growing to half of all electricity use in the current decade. The report was produced for the Greening Earth Society - one of the coal industry lobby groups fighting the 'carbon wars' - but there have been similar claims from figures such as George Gilder.

The report was criticised as fundamentally flawed. A 1999 critique (PDF) by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) for example suggested that the figures should be reduced by a factor of eight. LBL analysts estimated the annual electricity consumption of all the office and network equipment in the United States at about 74 terawatt hours. That was 2% of national consumption, rising to 3% if the cost of manufacturing the hardware is included.

Criticism has not, however, inhibited claims that Silicon Valley was responsible for the Californian power crisis or that internet hosting facilities ('server farms' or 'web hotels') guzzle more juice than some US states. One inference has been that there's an emerging power crisis in the US and other counties, thanks to the web, so restrictions on nuclear plants, inefficient coal-fired power stations and other nasties should be reduced.

The LBL Information Technology & Resource Use (PDF) study by Jennifer Mitchell-Jackson assessed energy use by data centres, explores why most estimates are significantly too high and supplies substantive rather than anecdotal figures for five facilities. The study drew on her Masters thesis (PDF) of May 2001 regarding electricity used by data centres. The thesis supplies measured top down (billing data) and the bottom up (counting equipment and measuring or estimating actual power used for each piece of equipment, then adding it up) data. Overall, the best estimate of power used by US centres is under 0.12% of all electric power consumption at the end of 2000.

The study reflects previous LBL research about the impact of information technology on resource use. In 1995 the Lab published a comprehensive assessment of power used by commercial-sector office equipment (PDF). It offered a point by point rebuttal (PDF) of Congressional testimony by Mills, during an inquiry that featured suggestions that the net - like photocopiers - should be turned off at night. Measurements in the second major assessment (PDF) of office equipment energy use released in June 2001 were consistent with forecasts in the 1995 study.

The new report suggested that total electricity used by all office equipment in the US was around 2% of all electricity consumption. Power used for all telecommunications, network and office equipment (including electricity used to manufacture the stuff in plastic boxes) accounted for around 3% of total US electricity consumption. Commercial sector office equipment electricity use is within 15% of that predicted for 2000 in the 1995 report, with the difference being attributed to by more people leaving their computers and printers on at night than envisaged in 1995.

Attempts at modelling the broader impact of the net or electronic commerce have been contentious, given disagreement about basic definitions, the muddiness of much data and questions about extrapolation.

Two examples are the 2001 OECD paper by H. Scott Matthews & Chris Hendrickson on Economic and Environmental Implications of Online Retailing in the United States (PDF), Klaus Fichter's 2001 paper for the German federal environment ministry on Environmental Effects of E-Business and Internet Economy: First Insights and Environment-political Conclusions (PDF).

A 2005 study by Ralph Gay, Robert Davis, Don Phillips & Daniel Sui on Modeling Paradigm for the Environmental Impacts of the Digital Economy more ambitiously suggested

40% to 50% reduction in life cycle energy and pollutant expenditures with e-commerce in the personal computer industry

Some studies seem sadly out of sync with reality, assuming for example that forecasts about the paperless office will come true - forecasts strongly debunked in works such as The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge: MIT Press 2001) by Abigail Sellen & Richard Harper discussed elsewhere on this site. There are thus questionmarks about statements such as -

By 2003, e-materialization of paper alone holds the prospect of cutting energy consumption by about 0.25% of total industrial energy use and net [greenhouse gas] GHG emissions by a similar percentage. By 2008, the reductions are likely to be more than twice as great. We also believe the Internet Economy could render unnecessary as much as 3 billion square feet of buildings - some 5% of U.S. commercial floor space- which would likely save a considerable amount of construction-related energy. By 2010, e-materialization of paper, construction, and other activities could reduce U.S. industrial energy and GHG emissions by more than 1.5%.

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