METHODS: Lower your digital carbon footprint

The adoption of ‘cloud’ language and greenwashing across the ICT sector has led the general public to underestimate the carbon footprint of their use of the internet and computers in general. For a better understanding of the impact of your activity, please visit internetlivestats, trackers on electricity used and on CO2 emissions are at the bottom of the page.

The community, company, and foundation Mozilla (noting various disputes on privacy and security in their products among cybersecurity activists), does provide the general public with critical information on privacy, artificial intelligence, and publish health and safety reports on the Internet. A recent blog shares ways to lower your impact on climate change. As noted in this article:

While the internet’s data is essentially invisible, it is processed and stored in massive data centers all over the world. Those data centers are powered 24/7, just waiting to send information — videos, podcasts, music, news, memes, messages and everything the internet offers — to our digital devices. All that data that we’ve grown accustomed to having fast at our fingertips along with our always-on mentality ends up contributing to our digital carbon footprints.”

Here they offer a reprint of the article Eight ways to reduce your digital carbon footprint. They also offer a longer podcast that explains digital carbon footprints in more detail.