So The Cloud, arguably the peak of human technology, uses contributes a tiny fraction of our total carbon emissions. Is curbing this technology in in any major way a productive way to reduce our emissions?
These emissions are all electricity usage converted to carbon emissions. Would it not be more productive to focus on transitioning all power generation to solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc?
This appears to be hyperbole - from what I could find, one steak has a carbon footprint of 15.5kg [0] and one Google search has a carbon footprint of 7g [1]. That makes one steak equal to 2214 Google searches. Over a lifetime, 2214 searches seems low. In my browser history, I found evidence of 776 searches in the last 3 months.
Moving away from searches, apparently 1GB of data transfer produces 3kg of CO2 [2]. That makes one steak equal to 5.16GB of data transfer over the internet - or less than one hour of 4K content streamed from Netflix [3].
[0] https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-one-Go...
[2] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irres....
My ISP caps me at 1.2TB/month. That would be $1200/month, but I don't pay anywhere near that.
25kWh in 15 minutes is 100kW. That's 150x the max amount of power my overpowered desktop uses.
On HN people claim AWS overcharges on egress pricing. They charge between $0.05/GB and $0.09/GB[2]. Their "overcharging" price is much lower (5% - 11%) than the cost of electricity if your numbers are correct, which doesn't make sense. Their ingress price is free, so they're not making up for lost money there.
Note that the power figure includes all of the networking equipment between your desktop and the server, and the infrastructure required to run it like cooling equipment. Also note that watching a video at 2x speed may result in the server sending less data than watching a video at 1x speed.
[0] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02...
The claim about CO2 emissions for a Google search was also contested at the time and later retracted by the original source [2][3]. Unfortunately, once on the internet, these things just keep getting repeated.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jiec.12630
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/12/revealed-the-times-made-up...
[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-sear...
Even for 2012, that number seems utterly implausible.
That's an interesting point, but I don't think that's the case for Youtube.
I'm not sure that adds up.
But that's including a _lot_ energy cost that isn't related to _transferring_ the data, but storing/generating/running services to send that data etc
[1] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02...
Well, doesn't that make it an even more accurate measurement of how much our data really impacts the environment? Data doesn't just exist at the moment its being transferred...
The same analysis goes for storage and processing. The economic marginal cost of storing and generating data as such is quite low, probably lower than the transit cost, especially since most data stored is either soon discarded or transmitted a large number of times.
Both are among the most successful economies of scale ever invented, pretty much the opposite of what the article alleges. Measure this out as a percentage of GDP or transit/storage cost per hour of work or entertainment - it is certainly worth more than one airline industry in economic terms, advances we could hardly live without unless the plan is to roll back living standards to the 1970s or earlier.