When climate activists clash with engineers, sparks will fly
At Faultline, we are not in the market of scaremongering technology decision makers into action. We are in the market of reporting on hard-to-swallow truths and building on those with pragmatic calls to action – and nowhere are the challenges harder to swallow and more difficult to build than in developing more sustainable technologies and business practices.
Healthy opposition and violent agreement were evident in equal measure during a webinar session this week, featuring a match-up between Dom Robinson, Founder of Greening of Streaming, and Gerry McGovern, author of the book ‘World Wide Waste’ and creator of a customer experience management model called Top Tasks.
From top Left: Benjamin Schwarz (CtoiC), Dom Robinson, Greening of Streaming, and Gerry McGovern.
In the latest Sustainability Expert Series, McGovern reeled off shock-factor figure after figure, each one sharpened as a more piercing arrow to the heart than the one before.
These ranged from the total impact of servers and consumer electronics devices on the environment – factoring in not just CO2 emissions during use, but other drains on the environment such as water usage during the manufacturing processes. But the slide that stood out, and one that gleaned the biggest reaction from
Robinson and the video-savvy audience, was one comparing 1,000 words of text to a 4-minute video.
McGovern has done some dubious number-crunching, whereby the total impact of writing 1,000 words is approximately 2.3kg of CO2 – for a piece that took 20 hours of laptop time to create (much too high), at 5MB in storage (way too high unless including high res images), and took one person four minutes to read. Creation accounted for 2.274kg of this total impact.
But scale that by 10,000 readers, and you’re at 666 hours of reading time. The amount of CO2 to create and store these 1,000 words does not change from 1 reader to 10,000 readers, but usage spikes significantly – to 114kg – to reach 116kg in total impact of these 1,000 words, according to McGovern’s numbers.
The feather-ruffling comes with how this same methodology has been applied to video – assuming that 1,000 words of text is equivalent to a 4-minute video file. McGovern’s reckoning is that a 4-minute MP4 video file at 25fps takes up 55 MB. A YouTube 30fps Full HD file is 70 MB, up to 110 MB for 60fps. A 4K file takes up 932 MB, while an 8K file of the same length shoots to 2400 MB.
The issue is that you cannot make the correlation between MB and CO2 in any sort of linear way. You cannot simply scale from a 1,000-word document to an 8K video file and correlate the carbon equivalent, without taking in all the steps in between. Attempting to measure bytes in grams of CO2 is a misleading barometer of
energy consumption in the streaming industry that many, like Robinson, are attempting to stamp out at source.
Robinson countered that Greening of Streaming working groups are tasked with trying to correlate the scale of major live events online, but confessed that they are struggling to spot energy fluctuations, because energy demand does not correlate directly with viewer demand. Network infrastructure just doesn’t work in this way, and this debate was a perfect example of the disconnect between sensationalist climate activists and pragmatic engineers.
Another oversight came in a slide where the growth of hi-tech and CO2 growth since 1975 was said to “almost identically map each other,” according to McGovern.
This is based on workings where the “cloud” comprises some 70 million servers (as of 2022), with each server storing an average of 10 zettabytes of data (that’s 10 billion terabytes). The world’s total data load is projected to exceed 2,000 ZB in a little over 10 years, stored on 1.6 billion servers.
Each one of these servers creates between 1 to 2 tons of CO2 to manufacture and creates about 2 tons in energy usage through its lifecycle, McGovern digressed.
For “heavy electronics” like servers, some 50% of the total CO2 impact occurs in the manufacturing stage, McGovern finds, while that rises to about 80% for consumer electronics devices – so the majority of environmental damage is already done at time of purchase.
Of course, these workings do not factor in the development of more efficient servers, and less power-hungry CPUs powering these servers. For instance, chip giant AMD launched its new MA35D ASICs just last week, claiming that one server housing eight MA35D cards is equivalent to fourteen servers relying on CPU processing power alone.
Unfortunately, McGovern was dismissive of this notion, claiming that the world has innovated itself into this mess and to think we can innovate our way out of it is futile and naïve.
“Technology has never reduced CO2,” implored McGovern, while decrying “the intense arrogance of the ‘tech bro’.”
Robinson, by nature, is less dismissive; more progressive.
“We don’t want to overegg the story and set impossible demands when there are people who want to make a difference, rather than focus on the hyberbole side,” said Robinson. “We’re in danger of carbon itself becoming a greenwashing tool. When carbon becomes so meaningless that anyone can say anything – it’s an accounting measure.”
Closing on a note of light optimism, McGovern pointed to the right to repair movement – legislation being brought in by various governments to forbid manufacturers from dodging the responsibility of repairing consumer goods. McGovern described the right to repair movement as “hopeful and promising” and
something that has “unified tech geeks and farmers.”
As for a dose of advice, McGovern referenced conversations with a materials scientist, who advised that material simplicity is somewhere all industries can improve. Products today are too complicated and are therefore almost impossible to reuse and recycle. Going back to basics would provide a greater chance of creating a circular economy.
We could spend all day nitpicking the napkin math, but that would detract from the prevailing message – “the sentiment behind the numbers I’m in coherence with,” noted Robinson.
A word from Broadcast Projects:
Thank you to Tommy Flanagan from allowing us to re-publish this article from the latest Faultline, a weekly publication analyzing disruption in media, broadband and advertising - for over 20 years. All stories in the current issue, and more, can be viewed on the Rethink website rethinkresearch.biz/product/faultline
The Sustainability Experts Series is platformed by Media Meet & Greet Connect 365 and takes place on the 2nd Tuesday of each month.
We welcome your support. If you are interested to learn more, please contact me. To attend our events, which are free, get registered on this signup page.
Tommy Flanagan, Editor of Faultline, from Rethink Technology Research.