The Chaser Report - Are Emails Killing The Planet? | Guillaume Pitron

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

How bad is the internet for the environment? What is the carbon footprint of a TikTok video? Are emails killing the planet? Author, journalist, and environmentalist Guillaume Pitron joins Charles Firth to discuss his new book, "The Dark Cloud" which answers all these questions and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles, just Charles, with you today, with a special guest, Guillaume Pichon, who's just written in the book The Dark Cloud, which comes out in a few weeks by scribe, is they right? Sure, yes, it's scribe publishing. Actually, it's released and published today. Oh, it's out.

Oh, well, there you go. Everyone should go and buy it. And basically, it's all about how terrible we are as a human race. Essentially, how everything we're doing in the digital world is basically, you thought it was good, but actually it's terrible. So why did you write this book, Yom? Well, Charles, I don't want to give lessons of morality to, you know, give lessons of morality to our listeners. I'm online all the time,

but I just want to stress the fact, as you said, that our virtual actions are not virtual. They are very much material, and they impact the earth. I am a journalist. I live in France. I'm an investigative reporter traveling on the field,

and for two years, I thought what about this cloud thing? This dematerialized thing, these virtual things. Is it really virtual? And I followed the trail of an email, literally, you can follow an email around the world from data centers to submarine cables, satellites, 5G and 4G networks, mines, electricity networks, and when you follow such a trail, there's nothing virtual and we need to be conscious of that.

It's actually, it exists physically. Well, you actually say one of the factoids in your book is that if you send an email with a large attachment, that's the energy equivalent of what, like an hour, leaving a light on for now. I turn it into CO2 emissions. And it's 20 grams of CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent of running 150 meters with your car. It's real. Yeah, it's, yeah. And you can multiply that for everything that you do online. If you want to watch a video, for example, it's very energy consuming. If you want to watch a Netflix series, don't get me wrong, I'm not a Taliban. I'm not saying don't watch TV and listen music anymore. Kind of sounds like you are. No, I'm not. I'm not. I

have come from so far but basically it has an impact and the thing is keep living your life in this way but you know keep this in mind because it's going to become something so strong in the future we're going to get to cryptocurrencies and metaverous and other chat gpt that it might become really something just uncontrollable and you need to be aware of this as a consumer and as a citizen so what you're saying is we can still keep doing everything that we're doing but we should just feel terribly awfully guilty about it. Is that the idea? Once again I'm not into guiltiness because I

need internet to write my books to investigate I need social networks to let people know about my book. So I'm not going once again to make people feel guilty but once again everything comes at a cost and don't believe this

wonderful message which says you're going to be able to do whatever you want to do online, you're going to get rich sure, you're going to get more wealthy and that's not going to come for any cost of the planet. That's just not true. And because we are so much into this climate change stuff and fighting camp, climate change, and that enrich the debates to understand that this virtual stuff is not virtual. I think you're a little bit mistaken. We're in Australia here, which means that we actually are in favor of climate change. We're the second

biggest polluter in the world. We've got the coal. We're trying to sell it off before everyone gives up on it. I think your message is, you know, use the internet more because, you know, but the thing is... The thing, Charles, is the electricity for your emails. Where does it come from? Well, hopefully, coal.

It may come from coal. So I'm not saying keep using emails instead of call because if you use emails in a point, you may be using cool for that. So it's not contradictory. Okay, so the thing is, what fascinated me about this book is that... We got sold, like Apple sells itself as an environmentally friendly company.

They've got a target that they'll be completely carbon neutral by 2030. Google has a similar thing. Most of their data centers are now, you know, running off solar and wind and stuff like that. They sell themselves as carbon neutral. What have they not told us about that equation? Like, is it not more environmentally friendly for us to stick at home and send out some emails than commute into work and, you know? If you were sending an envelope, an envelope with a written letter to someone, that would come at a much higher price for the planet than to send an email. The thing is, Charles, we don't send envelopes today with a word on it written, thank you, I'm coming.

So what I mean is you don't compare an mail to an email. You compare mails, as they used to be at the time, the quantity of them, comparing to the 363 billion emails, including spams. We send every day on the years. So this is what we call the rebound effect. That's just my emails. That's how many emails I see. And I'm not even counting the videos and all this kind of things.

So basically, what does Internet do is that it nurtures new ways of using Internet. You didn't think 10 years ago you would use Internet the way you use it today. If I see you back in 10 years, the way we use in 10, it would be crazy compared to what we do today. So what I mean is, obviously, it comes at a higher and higher cost. There is an inflation here. And then comes a Goggle company saying, oh, everything is green. We just want to make sure we're carbon neutral, and we just want to run our electricity out of solar panels and wind turbines. Which is very true.

It's carbon neutral in a way. Then they buy, you know, CO2 credits. So basically, you plant trees, they offset. You plant trees, which you can invest. investigate that. Oh, no. You want to look really what's behind us. It's a total scam.

My mom grew a forest and it was funded out of carbon offset. Like basically, she grew this forest and they paid for the planting of all the trees because she was getting these offsets, right? There was then a bushfire. It burnt down 100,000 trees. She's still earning the offsets from the trees that don't exist. It's brilliant. It's a genius grift.

And so this is a issue. So it's not that, I mean, brilliant, let's plant trees, right? But just don't take this for granted as such. It should go much further in the way you look at this offsetting stuff. And then there's an amazing solution, which is literally you want to move the cloud. You want to take the cat videos. You want to take the emails. You want to take the likes.

You want to take the swipes. And you want to take them from one place and move them to another place in the world. And this is what Facebook is doing with all. Facebook accounts, some of mostly the European consumers, and they move the cloud, which means the data centers and servers, to the far north of the European continent into the Lapland. And our cat videos and emails and, you know, angers and social networks are literally stored under meters of snow 24-7, 365 days a year, close to the Arctic Circle because over there it's cold. So you don't need to use electricity to run cooling plants in order to refresh the servers. You just open, I exaggerate, the door of the data center, and you let the fresh air breeze in. And so your emails are getting refreshed naturally.

So that's a way to save electricity, to use electricity from Sweden, Norway, which comes, it's hydroelectricity. So it's kind of carbon neutral. So it comes at a better cost. And thanks to this, you can say, all right, it doesn't have any costs on the planet. So let's use even more of them. Let's go to the metaverse. Let's have an avatar. Let's, why not ask chat GPT something really silly?

And we keep using and using and using more of this. So what you've got to see is, on the one hand, it's getting so much better thanks to technology, thanks to moving the clouds somewhere else on the world. On the other end, that keeps you having even more ways of using the Internet. And this is a race here between the technology and the wisdom, which, with which he uses such a technology. Yes. And this is what we're in now.

Yes. And so in some ways, what you're saying is to cut down on the 366 billion emails by having worse email etiquette. But maybe the solution is we just not be as polite. So we never say thank you, never send a thank you email. You know, just only send, you know, the important emails. I don't think that would change much. If they were to do something and I really give solutions,

because it's also an investigation about those around the world who have found solutions. And one of these solutions is, for example, the Farophone Company, it's a Dutch company, and they said over the world, Ferrephones, which is like an ethical, environmentally friendly frown, basically made of metals which have been extracted somewhere around the earth,

mostly in Congo, somewhere like this, in better conditions, more respectful of the environment and of humans than if they were being extracted for the sake of Apple, for example. So basically, it's a better phone for the environment, and they want you to keep your phone for eight years. So they make it repairable. If you want to change the camera, you change the camera. You don't change the phone.

You just change a piece of the phone. So basically, it's a phone that will last longer and that will make your digital life, having a less material impact, which is must of the internet and digital pollution. So if you want to do something first, is which of a phone you get, either you get a fair phone,

or if you get an Apple phone, like I do have an iPhone, I have an iPhone 7, I bought it secondhand, I will maybe resell it secondhand. I mean, after I don't want to use it. But in the meantime, it's broken six times and I repaired it six times. Batteries, screens, button, whatever kind of things. So that my phone will last longer and longer and this is what you're going to do. Yes, right.

Because there's a whole section in your book about phones and the impact. And I sort of, you don't think of your phone as having much of an environmental impact. It's such a small thing compared to, say, a car or a fridge or something like that. But you talk about the number of materials that go, like the actual, I'd never really thought about how many metals and stuff like that that you need. It's like 25 or 52, it's some, it's like 20, 70, 70.

Oh, right. Every day you use 60 or 70 metals because these are the metals, the metals in your phone. And we have no idea about that. And actually, in your phone, there is not only what's in your phone. there is all the materials that have been used indirectly to make your phone happen. In your phone in a way, there is water, there is coal.

There is uranium for the electricity that will help refining the metal. There is oil for transporting around the world, shipping around the worlds, all the various components on the phone to the Foxcon manufactories where everything would be assembled into a phone. So you have to make the total

or all of these commodities which eventually help making your phone possible. And that comes to the result that your phone is not 150 grams, but 1,000 times more than 150 grams, 150 kilograms. This is a real weight of your phone. This is the number of the amount of materials that is needed to make a small phone. So you believe it's small, but in fact it's big.

You believe it's light, but in fact it's heavy. This is a complete paradox of things. You really believe, oh, that's a good news, you know, because my phone is getting so small I'm going to have less of an impact than if I were using the phone of my grandmother you know the circular phone that's bullshit

it comes with an even bigger impact because it is small because it is made of diluted metals in the earth's crust rare earths from Australia by the way from Montveldt in Western Australia Linus company and you need to extract even more

even deeper to get these very diluted metals which have such amazing physical and chemical powers in order to put just one gram of this freaking rare earth to make your phone vibrate because that keeps your phone vibrating. And that comes at a huge material cost. So nothing is virtual. Everything is material. And the more virtual you get, the more material you get.

This is so unknown. And we need to be aware of this. Okay. So projecting for it, you said the way we use the internet now will be very different in 10 years, Tong. Oh, yeah. And I don't know about you, but don't you love going on chat GPT and... I've never been there. Oh, what?

No, no, you're an idiot. You should definitely, it's so much fun. Now, you know what? Yesterday evening, I thought I would do so, and I was just like, maybe my first question would be, how nice is Charles first? Should I go?

And I didn't want to take the risk of having Chadipi saying, don't go. So I didn't write any question yet. No, but the thing is, like, surely, like, because that seems to me a fairly revolutionary technology, surely what we should do is just keep going on, you know, make AI better and better and better and then get it to come up with the solution, all these problems that you're talking about. That's exactly the point.

You know what? We killed God, as you know, right? We've been killing God for the last 100 years. But now, we recreate a new God. This is Chad JPT. Chat JPT, what should I do? Does, you know, what should I do for the rest of my life? And somehow you can believe this wonderful, you know, machine which tells you, I know,

than you do. So it's kind of a god. And I have have a good news for you. Another good news, Charles. This is a green god. This is not, it's a god for green. I mean, why don't you ask Chad GPT, what would be your soul should need to save the planet? We humans just can't do that. We just try and we fail. And if the machine

were actually, you know, in a better position to know what we should do and this is something that a lot of scientists are thinking about on the US West Coast. What we make a machine which is so powerful an IA, which would be an IA for green, and which would tell us what we should do for the next 200 years? And this is being thought about, accelerate the

digitalization of our lives, because that's going to come up with so much data that will create deep learning sets for powerful AI to tell us what could be next. And these questions are being thought about at Oxford University. There has been a two-day symposium. It was theoretical questions, but fascinating questions, what's going to happen if we let an AI make the world green for us? Will we be responsible? We are generation, with the world we leave to our children. This is a machine. And there's a question, are we sure that the AI would not say, oh, you want to protect the planet? Let's get rid of the humans. So you want a Earth-friendly AI. It's the first thing that comes to mind, isn't it? Which becomes a human-friendly AI. How do you

parameter, the AI, in a way that to save the planet, it doesn't go against human interests. These are fascinating philosophical, theoretical questions that scientists are starting to ask right now. I really loved working this book. Working on this book. The Chaser Report. Less news. Less often. Can I just run you through some of your fact words that you have in your book? Because it's sort of fascinating. So, if did you digital technology were a country, it would be the third highest consumer of electricity behind China and the United States. Yeah, it's about 10% of electricity consumption.

Yes. And that would probably be doubling by the end of the decade. And that is because our use of digital technologies just rises exponentially. Yeah, and technological progress goes less fast than the new ways of using Internet, such as chat GPT. So in this race between better technological progress for using less electricity per data consumed, on the other hand, there is more usage. So basically it goes higher.

It gets more efficient, but our love of doing stuff on the internet outstrips the efficiency goes. Exactly. This is a point. This is why it's becoming a serious issue. This is becoming one, in my view, and I wouldn't have worked two years on this, Charles, if you don't believe that will be and that will be one of the most important

ecological issues of the next 30 years and that makes me turn to Greta and the climate generation all this wonderful I love them young going into the streets on the Fridays saying we want to save the planet don't take planes don't use plastic

don't eat meat very good what are about your freaking phones you use a young you're having you're 18 years old in France and you already had five phones You're on your sixth phone. You're spending for an American, on average, seven hours and 22 minutes on Internet every day.

It has an environmental impact. So you tell me what to do, my generation. But are you sure you're going to come up with better solutions? It's provocative what I'm saying, but I'm not sure the climate generation is really what it thinks it is. So you're saying that the average American child spends seven hours and 22 minutes on social networks every day per day. So my kids spend on average seven hours and 22 minutes on their phones per hour.

I would be interesting to know how I should do. But also it's due to, you know, obviously this brain, how you call that. Oh no, it's definitely breaking their brains. It's terrible. Brain rot. Meta and other companies want you to watch more and more and more of this. They want you to keep very interested in the blue. They love the blue because they know you like blue.

So they choose the best possible blue in the world in order to attract your attention. There are 13 million different shades of blue in the nature. And Microsoft wants for the Bing research tool, search the perfect blue. And it asks a machine, what is the best freaking possible blue so that you will spend more time on your phone and your auditor will spend 10 hours per hour on our phone? it's because there is a specific blue which runs the internet

and that keeps you very much concentrated so I investigated that and there's a red too there is a specific red but isn't it in your book you say the internet itself is green

like it's got a color yeah actually how does that work if you touch because internet is made of cables your data goes through the oceans forget about the satellites 99% of your

emails go through the oceans and in submarine cables made of fiber optic. So when someone sometimes is taking the cables outside of the oceans to recycle them, then he invites me to come and see these recycled cables which are waiting to be recycled in a port of Porto in Portugal. Lovely. And basically, you know, the big, you know, submarines cables are there and I look at them and they are black and green and I'm just like but this is a color of internet internet as a color

so I'm seeing internet I'm watching literally internet I put my tongue on the submarine cables it's salty so I've just tasted internet it has a taste it's not sweet

it's salty internet has a smell you can smell it if you go into the graphite mines of China where the graphite is being extracted in order to make batteries for your phone the graphite out of the mines

when it's being refined has the odor of an old butter this is a smell one of the smells of internet that have experienced so you can physically sense internet literally and you can understand that it's not virtual it's a thing

and as Greenpeace says it's set to become the biggest thing ever built by the human race for being connected and yet we have this illusion that it that it doesn't exist.

Exactly. We sold this idea that it's nowhere. It's buried. It's under the oceans, under the soil. And because it's somewhere in the air with, you know, spatial internet, all these constellations of satellites that we will hear about, but we will never see them.

Well, this strikes me as a very important message to get out to the world. How do you propose spreading that message, like... Good question. You know, like, what's an efficient way to get lots of people to know about it? Well, I really started with this email.

You know, follow an email. There is between you and I, Charles, one matter, okay? If I do send you an email right away, or a text message, or whatever thing on WhatsApp or on social networks, where will this message go? Do you think it's going to travel one matter? The real distance between you and I is 10,000 kilometers. It's going to run.

at the speed of light, almost light. And it's going to come to your phone within a second. But still, it will have traveled 10,000 kilometers. So the real freaking distance between you and I is what I've just said. Keep that in mind. You're listening to us. You're going to

want to, you know, send an email to your mother who's just sitting next to you or whatever. Keep this in mind that the distance between you and the others, it's much more than what you think it is. That would be a way to say things. Also, don't just believe technology

be very careful about oh technology will solve everything oh we're going to turn virtual don't worry about anything it's going to be fine this is dangerous you know

the future of humankind the future of humanity just cannot come just out of technologies it may also come on yourself how do you won't change your relationship to these technologies how do you change your behavior

or how you change your consumption lifestyles. Technology is a comfortable way to keep us distant from this very deep and clever and critical questions. And we should go back to that. We should go back to this very powerful message, which may be kind of a, yeah, like what do you do of your lifestyle? Keep an eye on that.

It's almost like the current prevailing sort of ideology of the world is technogreen and, And that actually what you're saying is we actually need to change our sort of ideological approach to philosophical approach, that essentially we've adopted a false profit. We are living a technological revolution. But what about my inner revolution? We are making, you know, leaps of progress. What about my lips of consciousness? We don't think about that. And yes, we have to go back to that at some point. And technology once again makes us feel, because you spend 10 hours an hour on TikTok, you don't have to think about that.

You just think about the next video. And that, you know, brings you to having your brain completely destroyed, by the way. And then when you really want to think about that, technology will solve everything. And once again, if you really want to get, you know, engaged into these climate issues, obviously the question is,

how do I not only think as a consumer about all these things, but as a citizen and all these questions Charles make us want to think as citizens on this. Do we just want to believe on the next technology is a green AI, the green portfolio AI to change everything? What about my question would be

what about the political implications of that? What about, for example, the impact of social networks on democracy? What about the impacts of TikTok on your physical and mental health? What about the geopolitics of all this? And if we were taking all these things into consideration and to think that maybe

the debate and the goal is just to go one step further with the next iPhone, but to think of all the new limitations that these technologies bring, mental limitations, physical limitations, democratic limitations, geopolitical limitations, ecological, material limitations. And how do we keep,

And we would start having a debate which asks us to be not only consumers of these technologies, but citizen-wise. Well, that is very inspiring and far too much effort. I think I'm just going to go back and get on my phone and scroll through the TikTok of it. The book is called The Dark Cloud, How the Digital World is Costing the Earth. It's by Gilom Pitron. It's out today. And you can get it an all-good book. bookstores, and I assume pretty bad bookstores as well. Can you download it on Kindle and do the most

ironic? You can e-read it and this is a question, Charles. Is it better to irrit it or to take a paper to have the heart of copy? Surely this is worse. Surely the physical book is worse. This is a tree we've killed. But you have to buy a Kindle before. So you need to buy a Kindle. So how many books does it take before you balance the environmental cost of your Kindle comparing to the environmental cost of the book. And what's the answer? Well, it depends on who you're asking for.

It depends if you're asking to Amazon or if you're asking to a bookseller. But basically, I would on average say that you probably have to read 60, 80 books in order to rebalance the environmental cost of your Kindle. So if you're a good reader, go on your Kindle.

If you just read one book at a time, don't buy a Kindle for buying the Dark cloud, go to your book or bat, a bookseller, and get the hard copy. Okay. There you go. But you see, it's complex. Thank you, Gilam. My pleasure.

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