Many people today know that riding electric cars instead of diesel and gasoline cars, trains instead of planes, and limiting the use of plastic materials is better for the environment, but few of us may know the negative effects on the environment that result from watching their favorite series on Netflix.
Our digital lives all over the world are not daily receiving and sending dozens of emails, exchanging dialogs on WhatsApp, storing one or more cloud images, and watching a few minutes of videos from time to time on YouTube.
But in general, our behavior on the Internet causes extensive climate damage. It is well known that all computer activities depend on the electricity produced most of the time on fossil fuels, and the resulting carbon dioxide emissions.
The matter concluded, however, that the carbon dioxide emissions from digital technologies exceeded that of air traffic by 2.5%. A study by the French non-profit center for studies known as the "TSP: The Shift Project" - which seeks to find alternative economic systems that adopt renewable energy - concluded that the transfer of digital data and its infrastructure are responsible for about 4% of all carbon dioxide emissions, and that The electric energy consumed in the use and transmission of digital data exceeds the energy used in operating the infrastructure and all computers together.
According to the Cisco IT giant, 60% of the world's population is using the Internet by 2022. And globally, data traffic is increasing at a quarterly rate. So, as energy and environmental engineer Maxime Evua-Hesse says in his recent study of the transformation project, "We must urgently think about how to use the Internet in the future" and "humble digitally" so to speak.
"We have only limited resources from energy, even renewable, so it is not expected that its use will prevail throughout the world during the next ten years, and for the Internet to become dependent on clean energy, all countries of the world should use only renewable energies, which is not expected." In the near future, therefore, this accelerated rate of global data transfer rates should be reduced.
The video clips and animations broadcast over the Internet make up 80% of the data transmitted, equivalent to three hundred million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. In addition to the videos stored on the Internet on computer servers that are available for access via computer peripherals, live video clips constitute 60% of the data transferred over the Internet.
The problem is that video clips and animations require the transmission of huge amounts of data. CO2 emissions resulted in an average of 300 million tons in 2018 alone. It is the same amount produced by a country like Spain in a year.
The higher the quality and accuracy of the videos, the greater the amount of data transferred. According to the transformation project, only ten hours of high-definition (HD) videos equals all Wikipedia data published in English.
According to Hess, the way we consume videos has recently changed dramatically. After being used to present a story accompanied by music, it was used to attract the attention of users and keep them for as long as possible on the sites. Our brains easily fall into the captivity of the animation that directs our attention directly to anything that moves.
This is the reason why more music, information and advertisements on the Internet are resorting to videos and animations. Not only that, at the same time, platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Netflix have been using more and more videos to activate the auto-play feature without having to play it by clicking on it manually, while adding the translation feature under the video to make consumption of information easier, to push the user to view The movie comes to an end most of the time.
Can the thirst of users to watch videos be reduced to reduce electricity consumption?