Before you get on a plane, there’s a good chance you will have looked at alternative travel options, or at least been asked to off-set your carbon footprint. If you’ve done neither, you’ll probably be left with at least a teensy kernel of guilt.

Listen to an interview with Dr Wissner-Gross

Aviation is often condemned, attacked as an example of our carbon-careless behaviour. But maybe it shouldn’t shoulder all the blame alone. Plane travel may responsible for 2% of human-generated CO2 emissions but then, so does your computer and the web it connects to. So how come IT hasn’t had nearly the same flak?

Computers don't have tail-pipes
Dr Alexander Wissner-Gross, who studies the environmental impact of computing at Harvard University, thinks he knows the answer.

“The concept of a carbon footprint is not nearly as visibly localised as when you drive a car – the car has a tail-pipe and you can see quite clearly emission coming out of the rear of the car. Computers don’t have tail pipes.”

Computers may not have an exhaust pipe but they are still gas-guzzlers. Being part of a big buzzing global internet comes at a price. The whole system runs off huge amounts of electricity, most of which comes from fossil fuels burnt in power stations. When we log on to our computers, we don’t see all the hidden costs, as Wissner Gross explains:

“Really when you are visiting a website, there’s a whole chain of events that’s initiated that requires power consumption from one side of the world to the other (if you are visiting an international site.) Electricity spans devices in this case. And this is a really interesting, largely unsolved problem: how do you get a hold on electricity consumption and footprint management when your environmental footprint spans multiple devices around the world.”

Internet bad for the planet
Not all computer time is equally green. Several factors can rack up the emissions, including, the location of the computer, the location of the server, the size of the webpage you are on, download sizes and download speeds. An average web surf produces 20mg of carbon dioxide per second. To put that in to context, that’s twice the amount we emit from breathing.

It’s something to bear in mind next time you waste hours watching videos of piano-playing cats on Youtube. But there are ways of greening the industry. The simplest way is to ensure that the power from the grid comes from renewable energy sources. Many in the IT industry also believe that computing can be a weapon against our carbon dioxide emissions. Cisco, the largest maker of networking equipment in the world, claims that using its teleconferencing equipment actually saves on emissions because workers need to travel less often for meetings:

 “There is a significant substitution taking place,” says senior director Bart Sweerman. “In fact a lot of executives are quite happy to substitute one or two trips a week by using telepresence technology.”

While there are calls for all of us to fly less in the future, computers are not going anywhere. Or rather, they are going everywhere. It’s predicted that by 2020, one in three households will own a computer, more than that if you include the ever-growing number of mobile phones. By then, the industry will be in the spotlight, centre stage and under much more pressure to green up its act.
 

Does the IT deserve the same eco-finger-pointing that airlines receive? Leave your comment here: