![]() ![]() The emoji is fine, we can relax about that. Mike Berners-Lee says the emoji is all right.Įxactly. Well, the emoji is all right, that's just like a character. Suddenly you're sending a lot more data - up goes the footprint. But the minute you start doing things like, "Oh, I'll send a photograph while I'm at it," that dramatically changes it. The other thing about texts is that they're so simple and basic, aren't they, all you're doing is transmitting a very simple message, you're not even putting any fonts on it or anything. In that sense, if we do what the reader asked us to do and set us aside the carbon footprint of manufacture and transport of the device, so that's an even smaller portion of that already tiny amount. So cell tower, data transfers, data centers? We took into consideration the energy used by both the sending phone and the receiving phone, and a proportion for the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the phone, which is a bit of an unknown because you have to make an estimate about how many text messages that phone is going to (handle) over its lifetime. What did you include in the estimate of the carbon footprint of a text message? There are whole communities in developing countries, where people are in contact with their friends, relatives, colleagues and so on - through text, in a way which they would not otherwise be in contact at all. It's the way that I keep in contact with my kids when they go out at night. By now, it will have grown quite a bit, but 32,000 tons is still a tiny figure for all the world's text messaging. When we wrote this a few years ago, we estimated the carbon footprint of all the world's text messages to be 32,000 tons of CO2e per year. ![]() So it's: How much does text messaging do for our lives? Against: What's the impact? So it's tiny.Īll carbon footprints are about bang for buck. We're talking about a very big number against a very, very, very small number. The world's carbon footprint is roughly 50 billion tons a year. person has a carbon footprint of about 15 tons a year, which is something like 35 kilograms a day. The technology has changed, somewhat - not massively, but somewhat - and the estimate I made at the time was 0.014 grams of CO2e. This is a little out of date, about five years ago. And the smallest, the very first item in the book, is the carbon footprint of a text message. The largest was burning all the world's fossil fuels. The book lists all these carbon footprints in order of magnitude, from very small to very large. I'm finding myself speaking to the pages of my own book, which is a slightly strange experience. Can you help me decipher that and get the answers? To me, there are two questions in this: What is the carbon footprint of a text message, and how much could that footprint, multiplied by all the text messages around the world, contribute to climate change. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. And estimating the impact of a text message is exactly the thing he did for his 2010 book How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint Of Everything.Ī carbon footprint, he explains, is a way of estimating the total climate change impact of something you do or buy - all along the supply chain, from manufacturing to delivery to use - with a metric called carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e, which translates all the different greenhouse gases into a comparable amount of CO2 by impact.īerners-Lee walks us through the impact of a text message, how it compares to emails and regular mail - and what happens if a text message itself is a heated one. Climate impact calculations are just the sort of thing he does for work at Small World Consulting at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. I tracked down someone who'd get us to the answer: greenhouse gas footprinting expert Mike Berners-Lee. ![]() Putting aside the sunk contribution caused by the manufacture and transport of the device you text with, how much does the battery emit / generate while a person does a typical or somehow average text?. "A friend asked how texting - in all its forms (admittedly a squishy thing to corral) - is contributing to global warming? After saying, 'minimally.', I thought about how to answer that question. ![]()
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