David Le Page
It has been announced that the Internet, which is changing the way we work, play and seek sex, will also save the world. At least, it will slow down the United States’s generous and unstinting contributions to global warming.
This is the finding of a report from the Centre for Energy and Climate Solutions, an American environmental consultancy.
In the past, economic growth has meant production, production has meant industry, and industry has soaked up energy.
That rule no longer holds.
The US economy grew more than 9% in 1997 and 1998, but according to the report, The Internet Economy and Global Warming, US energy demands have hardly increased.
Lead author Dr Joseph Romm outlines several ways in which the Internet saves energy.
Leading online book seller Amazon.com, for example, uses a sixteenth of the energy a conventional bookstore does in order to sell a single book. Air-freight delivery of books purchased online uses 40% less energy than a conventional purchase. Slower delivery by ground-transport uses a tenth of the energy used by the mall shopper.
Romm and his co-authors reckon that over the next eight years, e-commerce will radically reduce the US need for retail and office space, the former by up to 5%.
The combined energy savings of doing business online and on new retail space will save the country energy equivalent to the annual output of 31 typical power stations. Not to mention the 75-million tons of greenhouse gases which will not be released into the atmosphere.
What about the energy demands of the Internet itself? Personal computers are becoming more energy-efficient, says Romm, while the Internet backbone – what connects everyone – draws mostly on existing communications infrastructure.
This sea change in energy consumption means the US is far more likely to be able to achieve the targets for reducing greenhouse pollution to which it is pledged by the Kyoto global warming treaty.