Are you and I bigger contributers to the global carbon footprint than we thought?

Here’s a wee question for you.  Can you tell me one the most destructive industries on the planet in terms of carbon footprint?   I’m sure will come up with many answers.  I bet one of the ones you immediately thought of was air travel.  It’s a real baddie, isn’t it?  Right up there as being a terrible impact on the environment.  Big carbon foot print.  You can understand why many protesters focus on air travel.  They vent their anger on social media.  They use web and cloud based technology to really hammer home their point.

Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist who, at age 15, began protesting outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018 about the need for immediate action to combat climate change, is one of the people who makes really good use of channels like Twitter.  

But hang on, it seems when you dig into it, the web industry is really one of the worst of all.  

Yes, it’s true.  The data industry is responsible for more global carbon emissions than the entire aviation industry.   

How on earth do I come up with that idea? Well, turns out that all this data stored on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, YouTube, WhatsApp, is piling up.  Fast.  And the Cloud, or to be more accurate, 6,911 massive data centres located around the globe, are hungry for power. Very hungry.  They need massive cooling systems to keep them cool.  They really do eat up energy.

So next time you go on to Facebook or watch a video on Netflix or YouTube, it turns out you, like Greta, are actually contributing more harm to the environment than air travel.  Not sure young Greta has quite worked that the very medium she uses to promote her message has in fact the biggest carbon footprint of all industries.