It’s big, expanding and has a carbon footprint to match

A riddle. It’s invisible but ubiquitous, and growing exponentially. Even as it provides the capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, its own carbon footprint is ever larger. It is the fuel of clouds and the stuff that races through fibre optic cables at the speed of light.

It is, of course, the internet, or more specifically, Information and Communication Technology (ICT). At institutions as diverse as Melbourne University, and its counterparts in the University of California (UC) system in San Diego and Irvine, it frames the next generation of virtual meetings, with instantaneous transmission of image and sound, from near or far.


Larry Smarr is 54, and has lived through what amounts to multiple generations of the life of the worldwide web, from conception in the mid-1980s, when he fostered the network of connected computers known as the National Science Foundation Net, to the ultra high-speed present.

As Smarr explained it at the West Coast Leadership Dialogue conference here in Palo Alto, California, the future of the internet can be viewed in two dimensions. The first is to be faster, using fibre-optic lines to transfer large volumes of information almost instantaneously – no longer just as pictures or text on a screen, but ultra high-definition, skin tone-perfect live images, at 10,000 megabytes per second. The second is to be both clean and be cleaner, reversing its current position, as a significant and growing contributor to the carbon dioxide production that the vast majority of scientists believe is the principal cause of global climate change.

In the United States, the power consumed by computer data centres exceeded the demand of the nation’s TV sets three years ago. In Australia, 200 million tonnes of its annual emission of 576 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is caused by electricity, gas and water, with information and communication technology accounting for 20 per cent of those emissions. Globally, this technology produces roughly the same volume of emissions as the aviation industry.

Sydney Morning Herald