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As the world’s most powerful states pledge to limit global warming at the COP26 summit, we’ve all been following along online – but is that contributing to the problem?
At its best the modern internet delivers near-instantaneous service, loading the content of rich web pages from distant data centres to our screens in the blink of an eye.
But perhaps something slower, something simpler, would suit us just as well and come at less of a cost to the environment, asks Dr Werner Vogels, the chief technology officer at Amazon.
“As humans we’re addicted almost to high imagery, to beautiful experiences, however we also need to realise that that comes at a cost,” he told Sky News in an interview.
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Most people knowingly interact with Amazon as consumers. By some counts Amazon.com is the fifth most visited website in the UK and there are annual stories about its low tax payments compared to its high revenues, something which the company attributes to a “high volume, low margin” business model.
But the company’s real footprint on the internet and our lives comes through its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) which holds about a third of the global cloud computing market, more than any of its rivals.
Without realising it, people interact with AWS every time they access content from Spotify, Reddit, Twitch and Netflix among many others – and these interactions have a carbon footprint.
Cloud computing is in itself a much more environmentally-friendly option than the alternative, where small businesses and enterprises host their own IT infrastructure.
Partially this is due to economies of scale – back in 2013, a case study funded by Google – which also runs cloud services – claimed moving software applications to the cloud drops energy…
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Source : skynews
