Translator: Yasmin Klär Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Well...
I think I’m like you, actually.
I’m really like you.
In fact,
I am so like you
that I too have a catastrophic carbon
footprint.
But really.
Without straining myself.
From home.
Behind my computer screen.
This capacity, this power to pollute the planet just using the internet,
this power,
you all have it too.
Each and everyone of you.
But you are not the only ones.
In fact, we are four billion, four billion internet users,
four billion people who use the Internet, and therefore,
who pollute the planet using the internet.
But,
we can’t really be blamed.
No, it’s true.
The cloud was sold to us.
The cloud, wow!
This clean internet.
Too cute, it’s a little cloud, this is so cute.
This Internet which is not palpable.
We were sold dematerialization,
When in fact, we should have been sold re-materialization.
Because what is dematerialization?
It is a data transfer from our computers, from our phones,
on other computers.
Bigger, more powerful computers,
that will make our data accessible everywhere on the planet.
That’s what we call data centers.
Imagine the internet as if it was an Amazon warehouse.
When you place an order on Amazon,
that order is received by an employee of the company,
this employee will fetch your order, your product,
in the right department in the warehouse,
will pack it and this product will be transported to your home.
Each step requires energy.
It can be the energy of the employee,
who may have eaten an apple in the morning.
It could be the energy of the warehouse, electricity,
or just the necessary fuel for transport
by plane, by train, by truck.
With the Internet, it’s a bit the same.
When you look up something on a search engine,
when you send an email, you send data to a data center.
That data center
will process the information, then it will send some back to you.
It’s going to be a web page to display, for example.
And all of that consumes energy.
What do we store on the Internet?
Photos, mails, conversations, videos.
But what does it really represent?
How heavy is the Internet?
When we weigh ourselves,
it’s in grams, in kilograms.
But the Internet is weighed in bytes, the measurement of a digital file.
In 2017, the weight of the Internet was 8 zettabytes.
You will ask me, “What is a zettabyte? “, I imagine.
Fine, because I have the answer - maybe that’s what I’m here for.
A zettabyte is a trillion billion bytes.
Yes, it’s huge.
It’s huge.
Except that,
the internet is changing fast, it’s growing very quickly.
And-
In 2017, we are at 8 zettabytes,
but in 2020, we were at 40 zettabytes.
And projections for 2025, are at 175 zettabytes,
90 of which dedicated to home automation.
Home automation is an emerging technology,
connected objects.
For example, a connected light bulb, a connected switch.
This is your gate that you can open or close from your cell phone.
And it consumes energy
since it requires the transmission of information.
I’m talking about energy, I’m talking about data centers,
but what fuels these data centers?
What feeds them?
Let me tell you a little story, quickly, I swear.
When I was a kid,
I went with my parents on a trip in the eastern part of the United States,
the Appalachian mountains,
and I returned there recently.
I realized that the topography had changed,
radically changed.
To put it simply, the mountains that I saw when I was a child,
those mountains were gone.
We scalped the mountains.
They were detonated with explosives.
Truly ! Explosives.
Why do we explode mountains in the United States?
It’s relatively simple -
I think you saw the connection I wanted to make:
coal is extracted from it.
And coal is the main fuel of data centers in the United States.
When you use your computer, your phone,
surely you realize that it tends to heat up
after using it for some hours.
So imagine hyper-powerful computers,
crammed by the hundreds in the same building, a data center.
Imagine the heat it gives off.
So these machines have to be cooled.
Forty percent.
Forty percent of the energy consumption of a data center,
just goes to air conditioning.
It’s a vicious circle, in fact.
Usually, that’s when we say to ourselves: “But what about me?
In my daily life, how do I use the internet?
Do I pollute too?”
I will give you some examples, starting with emails.
Emails are the basic principle of internet in the end.
Except, what we don’t know,
is that the carbon footprint of an email is six grams.
Six grams, that’s equivalent to a sugar lump.
The problem is that we get plenty of emails.
In France,
on average, we receive 121 emails per day.
Worldwide,
we are talking about 10 billion emails - 10 billion multiplied by six grams.
That’s quite a few grams.
But there is a reason for that.
There is a reason to the carbon footprint of an email.
If tonight I email you, directly like that,
the email will not jump, it won’t go straight to you.
That email travels 15,000 km on average.
It’s not the most direct line.
Fifteen thousand kilometers, that’s 15 times Brest to Strasbourg.
It’s really not the most direct line.
What if we told ourselves that,
for example,
those newsletters we don’t even read,
why not simply unsubscribe?
It would avoid a useless transfer of information.
And those emails we’ve kept since 2010 -
yes, everyone has some -
those emails, they consume data, they consume energy,
because they are stored on a server and the server runs 24 hours a day.
In addition, this email from 2010 - it is surely not the only one -
is saved on another server, which itself is backed up.
We can just delete those emails.
Another example is audio streaming.
Deezer and Spotify for example.
When you listen - when we listen -
to a song on our mobile phone, we download it.
And when this song leaves the data center,
it is is exploded into thousands of little pieces
that will each take different paths
until they reach our phone where the song will be recompiled
so that we can listen to it.
That consumes energy.
So why not say:
“Hey, we’re just going to switch to offline mode.
We will download the file once. ”
Convenient.
Another example, a little more recent.
Maybe you’ve seen Tesla boss, Elon Musk, in the press.
He decided that Tesla was going to stop accepting bitcoin payments
for Tesla cars.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.
The reason given: bitcoin pollutes.
Indeed.
To make a bitcoin,
super computers are needed which will do mathematical calculations
to encrypt the currency.
They are called bitcoin mines.
What’s happening,
is that 80% of bitcoin mines
are in China and are powered, like in the United States, with coal.
Bitcoin mines for coal mines, or the other way around.
It’s interesting.
But the big winner of pollution on the Internet
is video streaming.
Video streaming is -
Wait, I don’t believe it, someone is sleeping at the back of the room.
You know what ? We’re going to wake him up.
We’re going to wake him up quietly with that.
(Music: Despacito)
I would have liked to play it entirely, but I can’t.
Despacito, did you recognize it? Everyone knows this song.
And for a good reason: seven billion views on YouTube.
Seven billion views, seven billion views.
It requires a lot of energy to play seven billion views.
So much so
that the required energy to play Despacito,
is equivalent to the energy consumption of the city of Bordeaux.
I’m not saying that every Bordeaux resident has listened to Despacito.
It’s not that.
But it’s not just YouTube, there is also :
Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime, TV shows, movies.
What’s great about it, it’s the quality of the videos.
Except that the higher the quality of a video, the bigger the video file.
And the more energy it takes transfer this movie, this series,
to our connected televisions.
Money Heist, do you know it?
I heard a no but I don’t believe it at all.
Money Heist:
when the last season came out,
40% of the pipes
that circulate information from data centers to our computers,
40% were loaded with Money Heist.
Impressive.
In fact, the Netflix data centers belong to Amazon.
All that to say that if the internet was a country,
it would be the third energy consumer in the world,
after China and the United States.
There are solutions for a less polluting internet
and we’ve mentioned a few.
But basically,
it’s about knowledge, it’s just being aware.
Knowing that the Internet really pollutes.
I told you about the Appalachian mountains,
those that were detonated with explosives.
What I didn’t tell you
is the companies that are responsible for blowing up these mountains
hide their wrongdoings.
They hide the craters left behind in the place of mountains
with a mixture of fertilizers, green dyes and fir seeds.
Tonight, I would like all of us togetherto say:
“Hey, we too are going to sow our own little seeds around us, ”
by telling our friends and relatives about it, our family, to our colleagues.
Just tell them: “The Internet pollutes. ”
Because I think that now you got it,
the cloud does not exist.
My name is Rémi Corson and I wish you a nice evening,
(Applause)