Imagine any banal, commercial warehouse. Inside it, racks of devices are stacked floor to ceiling. Industrial strength air conditioners gush 24/7. The temperature is chilly. There’s an incessant electronic whirring – the accumulated sound hundreds of thousands of hard drives chewing up power non-stop. Somewhere, out of sight, a diesel generator capable of powering a submarine sits on stand-by lest there’s an outage.

Now, imagine all this in a site that’s the size of five MCGs. This is a data centre. This is the Internet.

Current estimates tell us that there are 10,000-plus of these kinds of data centres world-wide and the number set to rise. Data centres are already voracious power-consumers and AI, crypto-currency and the internet of things will only increase their use.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres and data transmission now account for 1-1.5 percent of all global emissions. That’s equivalent to Australia’s entire global carbon footprint. And it turns out that this assessment may be conservative, based on new information about significant under-reporting of greenhouse gas emissions by tech giants.

Despite the enormity of these numbers, grassroots work is being done to meet the challenge. Rob Eales is an IT sustainability advocate who provides a service for small businesses and community organisations to help lower the carbon footprint of their websites.

“People are very surprised to hear that the internet generates a lot of carbon,” he tells upstart.

The average greenhouse gases produced by a website can range from approximately 50kg – 100kg of carbon per year, which equates to roughly 200km – 400km in an average car.  That’s based on the average website producing between 0.8 to 1.76 grams per view over 5,000 page visits.

“Each website might only produce only a little bit of carbon, some produce a lot,” Eales says. “But when you consider the size of the web then it becomes significant.”

There are around 1.88 billion websites and only around five million use green energy or 3.8 percent. Craig Ambrose a software developer, whose grassroots work also seeks to help organisations decrease climate emissions, says that when it comes to Internet energy consumption, websites are only the tip of the iceberg.

“There’s all these things behind the scenes,” he tells upstart.

The software that websites use to track consumers may use more carbon than the webpage itself. The broader problem, in Ambrose’s view, is that software developers have stopped caring about the energy efficiency of websites and are content to simply “throw more computers at the problem”.

“What if we made our websites modest in consumption so they didn’t become unsustainable?” he asks.

Another issue is that it’s difficult for individual consumers to make impactful emissions choices when it comes to using a website, he says. This is because the site may be providing a service which the consumer is obliged to use, for example, a phone provider or government site.

“I think there’s a few things we can do, however, they’re probably targeted more at the large cloud providers.”

Eales also has advice for individual users concerned with their carbon footprint. The actions are simple, he says, adding that they may appear ‘radical.’

“Delete all the photos on your phone,” he says.

This is because when devices automatically back up photos to the ‘cloud’, they are stored on a server in a data centre.

“Delete the ones you don’t want. You’ve probably got thousands.”

He also advises deleting emails in the same way. For Eales, these items are examples of “digital waste”. Since this content is easy to produce but hard to delete, it, and the energy required to store it, continues to grow. This might easily add up to thousands of gigabytes of data, he says.

In general, Eales is positive about the work he’s doing, even though he admits that it doesn’t compare when stacked against the impact AI will—and is—having on energy use. For him, the question is one of making a difference within your scope.

“You can actually use this sort of work as a way to point a way forward,” he says.

Ambrose, however, doesn’t display the same level of hopefulness. He sighs and falls silent, pondering of the future energy use of the Internet.

“I’m a hopeful person. I don’t want to sound all doom and gloom,” he says.

Ambrose doesn’t believe it is up to individual users of websites to solve to the issue of the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of the Internet. That is a legacy of large corporations unwilling to take responsibility for their own behaviour, he says. He is sanguine about one possibility related to Eales’s work, however.

“The idea that certain organisations might think about their web-footprint, just like they do about other aspects of their footprint,” he says.

“That feels really good.”

Story: Owen Eales wrote this feature as part of the first-year journalism subject, The Emerging Journalist.

Photo: Untitled by Manuel Geissinger available HERE and used under a Creative Commons licence. The photo has not been modified.