5 March 2019
By
Less of this, please Matthew Horwood/Getty Images
Our tech addiction is cooking the planet. The manufacture and use of smartphones, computers and TVs will produce 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 8 per cent by 2025.
That is the conclusion of a report on the sustainability of the digital technology sector put together by 12 experts for a Paris-based think tank called The Shift Project, which says that energy use in this sector is increasing by 9 per cent every year.
In theory, digital technology could replace other activities that produce even more emissions. For instance, people might be using video conferencing instead of flying to meetings. But this isn’t happening, says Maxime Efoui-Hess, one of the authors of the report.
“The ‘good effects’ of digital technologies, in terms of energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions, are constantly neutralised at global scale by the fact that we use these technologies without thinking about the right way to do it,” he says.