Energy consumption by email (and the Internet)

Depending on who you listen to, it seems there’s always a study indicating that energy consumption driven by the Internet is bad. If you add up the energy consumed in the construction of our computers and networks, the operation of our servers and the transmission, storage and retrieval of all this information, you get the equivalent of from 4 – 19 grams of CO2 generated per email. Each Google search costs approximately 0.2 grams of in terms of energy consumption.

So now, do feel a little guilty about the pollution you generate every time you send an email to Grandma or search for something on the Internet?

I wonder if the people who seem to use these results out of context actually ask the question: what are we gaining by this? How much activity in terms of energy consumption are we avoiding by moving activities from the real world to the Internet?

Example: Most banks would normally send you your bank statements and credit card statements by snail mail using dead trees (paper) as the medium. What’s the energy cost of that? Imagine the energy used by the tree cutting, the processing of said tree into mulch which is then turned into paper. The paper is packaged, then shipped by truck to be later sold in bulk to the institutions who use their big mainframe computers to churn out all the bills, invoices and statements, packed into paper envelopes and then shipped by postal mail by more trucks, airplanes, mules and whatnot, to finally arrive at your home.

… Repeat this process billions of time per year.

VERSUS

Using computers to produce the same information, transmitting it over the wire, and downloading to your own computer. Even if the latter process is also repeated billions of times per year, I suspect the amount of energy used to do everything electronically is far less than the old way.

This logic can be applied to tons of activities that have been displaced by the Internet. From telecommuting (how many millions of barrels of oil are we saving by NOT having to travel all over the place?) to legal online music purchases (donwloads versus buying CD/DVDs which are made of plastic = more CO2).

It seems to me that even if the entire Internet required the energy-equivalent produced by a small Western nation, the total amount of energy saved by moving a huge swath of our economic activity to the virtual world would be a win-win situation.

In the novel Earth by David Brin, where mankind combats all these environmental problems that we currently worry about (though they have not yet come to pass), the Net is seen as one of the salvations of mankind. Since it diverts so much of our productivity into a low-impact environment (the virtual world) as opposed to traditional industry, it helps alleviate some of the pressure on the ecosystem.