Manoush Zomorodi explores the surprising environmental impact of the internet in this episode of IRL. Because while it’s easy to think of the internet as living only on your screen, energy demand for the internet is indeed powered by massive server farms, running around the clock, all over the world. What exactly is the internet’s carbon footprint? And, what can we do about it?
info core.
Manoush: Okay. Next, we share the average length of an IRL episode, the average file size of our MP3s, and the average number of listens.
Miles Traer: I was able to then multiply that kilowatt hour per gigabyte for each one of those downloads given the size of a file, and then I could use the carbon emissions coefficient to figure out how much carbon is being released by that electricity consumption.
Manoush: The Internet’s electricity can come from coal or natural gas plants. It can also come from renewable sources like solar or wind energy or hydroelectricity. It can also come from nuclear plants. Each of these sources emit vastly different amounts of carbon. For simplicity’s sake, Miles found an average. 650 grams of carbon for every kilowatt hour. Okay, so now a little bit of math and we get our answer.
Miles Traer: That’s right. The final carbon footprint of a single IRL episode comes out to 1,160 kilograms of carbon dioxide.
Manoush: Oh dear. Okay. According to Miles, an average IRL episode emits about 1,160 kilograms, stick with me here, or roughly 2,500 pounds of carbon dioxide. That’s like using a little under three barrels of oil, but I don’t know. Is that a lot? Well, Miles did a quick comparison.
Miles Traer: So that’s a great question. It sounds like a lot. It’s over a metric ton of carbon dioxide, but that number is still at least—at least—a hundred times less carbon dioxide emissions than a single TV show episode, like a single half hour TV show episode. So we’re still doing better than television.
Manoush: That means all things considered, there are worse things you could do than listen to a podcast.
Miles Traer: Go podcast, team podcast forever.
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https://irlpodcast.org/season5/episode3/
IRL is an original podcast from Firefox, the tech company that believes privacy isn’t a policy. It’s a right.
Unless otherwise indicated, IRL Podcast episodes are available from the Mozilla Corporation under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, or any later version.
