Though half the world is yet to log on, the internet is already the largest coal-fired machine on the planet, accounting for 10% of global electricity demand. Experts are warning that the roll-out of 5G and proliferation of internet-connected devices could drive a ‘tsunami of data’ that will have dire environmental consequences. ADAM TURING reports.
The internet is set to expand to 20% of the world’s electricity demand by 2030, at which point it will produce more carbon than any country except the US, China and India – a larger carbon footprint than the entire aviation industry. Streaming alone could easily be 10% of global electricity use by 2030. Streaming one hour of Netflix a week requires more electricity annually than the annual energy consumption of two new refrigerators.
5G: of military interest
5G is not just an environmental danger due to the ‘tsunami of data’ it could provoke: the US military has been investing a significant amount of time and money in 5G and are approaching companies in the industry to ‘show them what they have’. The US, Russia, China and France are all developing Mach 5 hypersonic weaponry and advanced missile defenses which use 5G to operate. Drones, the Pentagon’s weapon of choice for assassination around the world, will also be given greater capabilities by 5G, including live 4K video streaming, object recognition and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Green lies
Technology giants like Google deflect attention away from their huge environmental cost by flaunting their supposed green credentials. According to its annual environmental report, Google first committed to ‘carbon neutrality’ in 2007 and purchased carbon offsets equal to their existing output. Carbon offsets are a PR stunt: they do nothing to reduce the volume of emissions being spewed out. They are meant to sell us a comforting lie: nothing needs to change, if companies just plant enough new trees then they can go on overexploiting the earth’s finite resources.
In 2017 Google announced that its data centers would be running on 100% ‘green energy’ from now on. Increasingly, ‘green energy’ relies on lithium, a mineral nicknamed ‘white gold’: demand is expected to more than double by 2025. Lithium is used for energy storage in batteries, energy regulation and in power generation itself. The insatiable hunger for lithium is already driving environmental exploitation and human misery around the world, including in Bolivia, which has potentially as high as 70% of the world’s reserves. In November last year, the US-backed fascist coup to overthrow President Evo Morales had as one of its aims the opening up of the reserves to US companies (see p7).
Profiting from climate crimes: Big Tech and Big Oil
Google uses AI to oversee power distribution to minimize energy wastage. This technological development is used only to expand their profit: Google has partnered with oil companies Total and Anadarko Petroleum to use these same technologies to analyse large volumes of seismic and operational data to find oil, maximise output and increase efficiency for environmentally disastrous oil extraction.
Google isn’t alone; along with Amazon and Microsoft, Big Tech has collectively invested billions of dollars in services intended to streamline, improve and render oil and gas extraction operations more profitable. These deals have been openly reported in trade journals and business sections, but somehow big tech’s sweeping embrace of the oil industry has managed to escape wider notice and criticism. Unsurprisingly Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) division which provides services to a substantial portion of the entire internet – including streaming services like Netflix – has an oil and gas division to promote its services to the fossil fuel sector.
An internet made for profit
The economic driver of growth on the internet is revenue from advertising and the selling of user data to companies to better target said advertising. This allows them to optimise the efficiency of advertising campaigns with laser focus to undercut costs and maximise profit.
Internet advertising is a huge contributor to carbon emissions: when a single large website – USA Today’s European site – removed all of its tracking scripts and ads to be compliant with new data protection laws, the website’s carbon usage shrunk to a tenth of its size while remaining otherwise identical. The reduction in carbon emissions was equivalent to a flight between New York and Chicago each month.
The internet is now intimately connected to the global economy; from the stock market, to logistics and of course online shopping. Any challenge to the existing model will not only be opposed by the Big Tech giants but by the entire capitalist class which relies on it to continue to feed the wheels of the digitised imperialist machine.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 274, February/March 2020
