Abraham Lincoln and CO2 Emissions

When I was about nine years old, I had forgotten about a report due the next day on the life of Abraham Lincoln. My parents took me to Books, Inc. at Town and Country Village in San Jose and they bought me a book of biographies - which included one on Lincoln - so that I could write my report. The round trip was about 20 miles, meaning that in our 1967 Camaro (which I wish I still had), we burned about 1.2 gallons of gasoline. Given that the carbon content of gasoline is 2,421 grams per gallon, that trip to purchase the biography on Lincoln put 2,905 grams of carbon into the atmosphere.

For those that subscribe to the theory of man-made global warming, my report on Lincoln had an enormous environmental impact. If the Internet and Wikipedia had been around when my report was due, only 80-100 milligrams of carbon would have been dumped into the atmosphere.

Why is this relevant?

There is a great deal of discussion about the negative environmental impact of the Internet and computing in general, such as this article from CNN. While many of the reports are interesting and while the global Internet and computing infrastructure does consume a great deal of energy, one thing missing from many of these analyses is the positive impact that the Internet has on the environment.

For example, in my example above, the Internet would have reduced by 99.997% the amount of carbon that I put into the atmosphere. Having access to computers and broadband services, allows people to live and work in remote locations instead of moving to cities and adding to already congested roadway and power infrastructures. We can conduct training and marketing sessions via Webcasts instead of traveling to remote locations. Millions of employees can work from home one or more days per week instead of having to commute, which saves millions of gallons of gasoline every day. We can buy things online instead of driving to a store, instead relying on more fuel-efficient delivery services to bring products to our door and reducing the amount of fuel required to obtain a product.

Yes, computers consume lots of power, and efforts to reduce their consumption of electricity should be pursued -- Google, IBM and many others are leading this charge and they should be commended for it. However, one of the keys to good research and analysis is taking into consideration all of the relevant factors before coming to a conclusion. Doing that might reveal that computers and the Internet actually result in net reductions in carbon emissions and fuel consumption.