Dirty digital age

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, font of all scientific knowledge, recently authored an article that shows the true cost of today’s technology. According to a post on the ABC website, Dr Karl says that telecommuting and mobile technology are not contributing to a cleaner and greener environment, despite a common belief that they must be.

Kruszelnicki says that the internet is likely to be the largest thing built by humans and that by 2020 80% of the global population will be hooked up, through about 7.6 billion mobile broadband connections. Obviously, the cloud has lessened our reliance on local storage, but the data from all of our online actions still has to be stored somewhere — data centres.

While it’s no surprise that the energy requirement for data centres to run is extreme, Dr Karl suggests that the cloud is responsible for around 2% of the entire global energy demand. If it were a country, it would be sixth in the world in terms of consumption, coming after the USA, China, Russia, India and Japan, but requiring less than either Germany or Brazil.

Kruszelnicki says that Google alone uses more power than the entire country of Turkey and that its consumption is increasing by around 12% per year.

And it’s not just power — the water usage associated with cooling data centres is alarmingly high as well, with data centres for the US Government’s National Security Agency (NSA) using 6400 tonnes of water a day.

As Dr Karl points out, we aren’t going back when it comes to technology, but he bemoans the fact that it comes at an environmental price. Then there are the raw materials that are used to make the technology we rely on and the e-waste that’s left when devices are no longer required.

He’s quick to point out that while many high-tech companies are specifically aiming to be green, in many instances this is nothing more than lip service and that ultimately, society is left to fund the clean-up and health costs.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/kantver