Sending dozens of emails a day, making a quick call on WhatsApp, uploading some photos to the cloud, watching a short viral clip on YouTube: It's all part of the digital daily life around the world. For the individual, it may be "just one photo" or "just a few minutes of video," but, taken together, our collective internet traffic contributes enormously to climate change.

Everything a computer, tablet or smartphone does requires electricity. And, to generate that electricity, the world still predominantly uses fossil fuels — which produce carbon dioxide and contribute to heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

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Digital technologies have even surpassed the aerospace industry in terms of carbon emissions. While aviation's share of global CO2 emissions is estimated to be around 2.5%, and rising, nearly 4% of all CO2 emissions can now be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure, according to a recent study by Paris-based think tank The Shift Project. The NGO is researching ways to redesign the world's economy so that it runs on renewable energy.

'Limited energy resources'

The calculations include both the energy costs of creating IT infrastructure and the actual use of that infrastructure — with the latter consuming 10 percentage points more electricity than the production of all equipment and technology combined.

According to a projection by IT giant Cisco, by 2022 around 60% of the world's population will be online, with video making up more than 80 percent of all internet traffic. Maxime Efoui-Hess, an energy and environmental expert at The Shift Project and author of the study, said we need to urgently reconsider the future of internet use and think about cutting back.

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"We have limited energy resources," he said, pointing out that even if we make the shift to renewables now, "the internet is a worldwide thing, so it would require every country in the world to be powered by renewable energy." But he said that goal remains impossible in such a short time, meaning we can't let internet usage grow as rapidly as it has to this point.

The largest share of that growth is now video traffic: 80% of all data transferred online is video data, with nearly 60% of that being online video, meaning streaming videos stored on a server and viewed remotely, via sites like Netflix, YouTube or Vimeo.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action Striking for the future "Why study, if our future is being destroyed?" This sign features a sentiment shared by increasing numbers of German students, who have joined young people worldwide in using Friday school strikes to call for action on climate change. The movement was inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began her protests alone in front of the Swedish parliament in August 2018.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action No time to wait With the 2015 Paris climate accord, nearly all of the world's countries committed to limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably 1.5 degrees (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), by 2100. The hope is that this target will prevent the worst effects of climate disasters. Concerned by the dire predictions from climate scientists, more and more people have called for immediate action.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action Youth pressure Despite urgent warnings, politicians have dragged their heels on important climate decisions. It's become clear that Germany will miss its targets for 2020. Climate protection was an important factor in the European elections in late May, with the Greens winning more than 20% of the vote in Germany alone, more than double previous results. Among 18-24-year-olds, 34% backed the party.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action Coal struggle in Hambach Germany's climate movement is fighting on many fronts. In recent years, activists have fought to preserve Hambach Forest in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, building treehouses to prevent the old-growth forest from being felled to make way for the mining of lignite, or brown coal. Energy giant RWE has launched legal action, and police have cleared the camp several times.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action Victory, for now In September 2018, a few days after the camp was removed again, a court ruling suspended the clearing of the forest until late 2020, after a lawsuit by environmental group BUND. RWE has argued that the forest has to be cut in order to ensure the coal necessary for Germany's electricity supply. Around 50,000 activists celebrated the victory.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action Making headlines Protests organized by groups such as Ende Gelände have increasingly been making headlines. Thousands of young activists have come out to staged events, blocking railway tracks used to deliver coal to power plants near Cologne and occupying huge coal excavators, as seen here in the open-pit mine in the east German town of Welzow in 2016.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action 20 more years? In January 2019, after seven months of negotiations, a coal commission set up by the federal government to work out Germany's plans to phase out coal power released its findings. It recommended that Germany should continue coal mining until 2038, at the latest —far too late for the country to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

Germany's growing climate movement demanding action No confidence in politics An increasing number of young people in Germany are demanding that the government find a way to meet the 1.5-degree target. The emerging Fridays for Future movement has been getting support from longtime environmentalists, teachers, academics and parents. They have called for all German coal-fired power plants to be shut down by 2030, and for renewable energy initiatives to be vastly expanded. Author: Gero Rueter



The problem: transferring videos online is data-intensive. In 2018, online video traffic was responsible for more than 300 million tons of CO2, equivalent to what a country the size of Spain releases in a year — for all sectors combined. The higher a video's resolution, the more data that's required. Ten hours of high-definition film consumes more bits and bytes than all the English-language articles in Wikipedia put together, according to The Shift Project.

The way we consume videos and movies has also changed radically. In the past, films told a story with moving pictures and music; today, online videos are primarily used to hook a person's attention for as long as possible. "It moves, and there's sound, and that's attractive to our brain," said Efoui-Hess. "But it can lead to addictive behavior."

Platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Netflix have increasingly exploited this biological preference, he said. The autoplay function lets videos start automatically, without sound and with subtitles, making information even easier to consume. "That's just the way to make you watch the whole video — and it works."

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Last mile is crucial

Can this growing hunger for videos be satisfied, in a way that spares the climate? Or do we have to go without our favorite streaming TV series and films? Efoui-Hess points out that it would indeed be better to watch something on a standard TV broadcast — analogue broadcasting also consumes electricity, but the data is only transmitted over a limited geographical area, rather than halfway around the world, as is the case with streaming video.

Lutz Stobbe, who researches the environmental impact of information and telecommunications technology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration in Berlin, said when it comes to data transfer, the last mile is crucial — as in, what specific technology is used to bring the data to the consumer.

Watch video 01:03 Why linear TV still matters in the age of streaming

Mobile data transfer uses the most electricity. Basic transmission loss, solid structures like buildings, vegetation and atmospheric conditions — in other words, weather — can weaken electromagnetic waves and led to buffering videos. For that reason, the transmission signal needs to be boosted, especially when the signal is being routed over long distances through old copper cables.

"The power amplifiers have a low electrical efficiency, which means that about half of the energy used for data transmission is lost as heat," said Stobbe. "The most efficient transmission technology is fiber-optic cables, which transmit signals by light."

Germans, for example, mainly surf the internet via copper cables; as of 2017, just over 2% of all broadband connections in the country used fiber-optic cables. By contrast, the mobile communication network is being expanded on a massive scale.

To help save on energy, Stobbe is currently working on something known as edge computing, in which the desired data is stored locally, closer to the consumer in places like data centers in major cities. That way, it doesn't have to travel as far to get to where it's going.

Exhausted tech

Stobbe said those hoping for next-generation devices and processes to be more energy-efficient will be disappointed. When it comes to technology, energy efficiency hasn't improved significantly in the last decade. That's why it's best to use your older devices as long as possible, he said.

What remains are small tweaks to our daily routine. "This is what's called digital hygiene," said Stobbe. "Do you really need to upload 25 images of the same thing to the cloud? Every photo, every video is constantly backed up, for safety reasons, and that consumes energy every time. If instead you delete a few things here and there, you can save energy."

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Efoui-Hess is also an advocate of small changes. "Use Wi-Fi, not mobile networks, watch on the smallest screen you can — and high-definition video on a smartphone aren't really necessary," he said, pointing out that watching high-definition videos on a smartphone over a mobile network uses the most electricity, and consequently is the worst for the climate.

To raise awareness of the impact everyday digital life has on the climate, The Shift Project has developed a CO2 calculator browser add-on that measures the emissions generated by internet activity. Nevertheless, the NGO doesn't place the responsibility solely on the end user; it believes the issue should be an important part of the political agenda. But so far, neither governments nor international institutions have recognized the problem, let alone made any efforts to bring about change.

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