Nowadays, we “google” anything that comes up to our mind at any time of the day. How far away is the restaurant I am going to? How to make a face mask? (Actually, the most asked “how to” question on google the UK in 2020). Those Google searches might feel seamless and harmless to the user, but they actually have a great carbon impact on the environment. Simply by accessing this article, you have consumed a significant amount of CO2 – which can be checked here: CO2GLE.
Way more than you expected, isn’t it? We must be aware of our environmental impact and be able to quantify it – for example, seeing the CO2GLE increase by more than 100 000 Kg in a few minutes for just one website. We became so used to constantly using the internet and being dependent on it, especially during a pandemic where we rely on our digital tools to maintain our daily activities, that we tend to forget the impact it can have. In 2020, The numerical energy consumption accounts for more than 15% of the global energy consumption.
As cutting off Google or just reducing our internet use sounds infeasible in today’s world, one other way to decrease our electronic emissions is to consider using a conscientious search engine. One of the most known “green” search engines is Ecosia, which was created in 2009 and plants trees with the income obtained from advertising. The company donates at least 80% of its advertising benefits to WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) programs for deforestation. Ecosia is powered by Bing and tends to display more advertisements than most search tools. The use of Ecosia is not as fluid or well thought as Google but remains pleasant to navigate. One very satisfying feature is that the user can see in the home page how many trees he has planted with his internet searches. Therefore, with Ecosia you can directly quantify your positive environmental impact.
Though, most users remain skeptical of the positive impact of Ecosia, claiming it feels like another carbon offset project to soothe our guilt. Nonetheless, Ecosia has been thoroughly reporting its donations and the evolution of the number of trees planted to account for the carbon offset. According to the Ecosia Year in Trees 2020 report, the company has reached its goal of planting more than 100 million trees by the end of 2020. Just in the past year, “Ecosians” have financed 37 million trees to be planted. An environmental impact of that scale is hard to ignore or even to question.
Thanks to competitors such as Ecosia, Google is under increasing pressure to keep its environmental cost in check. Despite the EU antitrust regulations for monopolies, Google’s market share is 93,14% of the European market. Therefore, Google’s strategy and management priorities have direct consequences on the European environment. In fact, Google has made sustainable development one of its priorities for the past decade. According to Google’s 2019 Environmental Report, “on average, a Google data center is twice as energy efficient as a typical enterprise data center” and the company is actively committed to relying solely on renewable energy for its worldwide operation. One particularly interesting case is the Gmail server: by using the email server for your business you can reduce the GHG emissions impact by up to 98% compared to another server use. Thanks to the highly efficient and renewable energy-based infrastructure of the Google Cloud, Gmail is one of the greenest email servers available. Another way to decrease your carbon footprint with your emails is to “eco-message”: send a link to a document instead of a big document attachment, regularly clean your mailbox to not waste space in your cloud, and also avoid sending unnecessary emails (the usual niceties, the “thank you” email for example). As reported by the BBC in March 2020, if every adult in the UK sent one less “thank you” email, it could save more than 16,000 tons of carbon a year – the equivalent of taking around 3,330 diesel cars off the road, according to energy company OVO.
Overall, while changes in our personal online behavior will only take us so far, the main way to decrease our numerical carbon footprint is to express our concerns to the companies concerned and push them to make a bigger change in their business model for the environment.
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