Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet
Get our free Climate email
Get our free Climate email
Every email, TikTok and text people send is harming the environment.
The world is producing record emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, contributing to the catastrophic rise of global temperatures. Carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than any time experienced during human existence, meteorologists say.
But, big tech relies on energy produced by the fossil fuel industry to power Facebook posts and Instagram Reels. In 2019, the carbon footprint of digital technology accounted for 3.7 percent of global emissions. That percentage is expected to double by 2025, according to the French think tank The Shift Project. Now, researchers have quantified specific impacts users may want to consider before they hit “send” or “post.”
For example, the environmental impact of the annual emails an employee sends for their work is equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide emissions produced by driving five miles in a gasoline-powered car.
Emails produce 2,028 grams of carbon dioxide emissions each year, cost optimization platform CloudZero found in a new report.
“Sending work emails has become such a routine part of our day that we often don’t give them a second thought. Whilst it may seem like a harmless, if tedious, activity we do every day, the environmental impact of these activities is far greater than we realize,” the software company warned.
CloudZero also analyzed the footprint of other seemingly innocuous tech-reliant practices, such as mindlessly doomscrolling and sending a text message.
Just one person scrolling through social media in any given day, authors said, produces 968 grams of carbon dioxide: the same amount as driving a car for 2.4 miles.
Each year, a single individual’s social media use generates a whopping 353,466 grams of carbon. That’s the same emissions generated by a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Furthermore, surfing the Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is equivalent to producing 2.63 grams of carbon dioxide emissions per minute. Other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube were found to generate fewer than 2 grams. Instagram is responsible for 1.52 grams per minute, and Facebook and YouTube both produce the equivalent of less than a gram of carbon emissions.
The report said that sending more than 60 texts to friends and family in a day — the average number of messages for a person in the US — amounts to 310 grams of carbon each year. That’s the same amount as charging a cell phone 32 times. And, each text sent is the same as producing 0.84 grams of emissions.
Gen Z produces the most carbon by sending texts each year. The age group’s environmental impact, some 652 grams of carbon dioxides from an average of 124 texts every day, is the same as emissions produced by driving a car three miles.
For those between the ages of 25 and 34, that number is nearly half.
But, the need to reduce footprints remains. People can do that by making sure they’re not unnecessarily consuming energy, scaling down energy usage and using websites hosted on energy-efficient servers, CloudZero advised.
But, the tech industry is seeing its footprints jump as it leans toward electricity-hungry artificial intelligence ventures. Microsoft said in May that its total planet-warming impact is about 30 percent higher than just four years ago. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions last year were 48 percent higher than in 2019.
AI, which has also been promoted as a potential climate change solution, comes with a hefty cost. Data centers need massive amounts of electricity to meet demand.
To mitigate these impacts, giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are turning toward nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is a climate solution because its reactors don’t emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contribute to the planet’s increasing warming. Earlier this month, Google announced an agreement to purchase nuclear energy from the northern California-based Kairos Power. But Microsoft is reportedly also selling its AI to fossil fuel companies, according to The Atlantic.
These moves are made as demand for power surges around the world. People used electricity more than ever last year, according to report from UK think tank Ember. They also used more renewable sources.
With reporting from The Associated Press
