Internet Footprint

I read this article in yesterday's Guardian

Guardian Online Link

which gave me pause for thought.

According to the article, the energy footprint of the web is growing by 10% a year, and will soon overtake aviation as a source of CO2 emissions. The data centres that store the billions of pages of information which we view online are enormously energy-hungry. According to this article, it is estimated that US data centres alone used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006 - enough energy to supply the whole of the UK for two months. It is estimated that every Google search has a carbon footprint of 0.2g CO2, which doesn't sound like much, but when there are 200 million Google searches per day it starts to have a real impact.

And that doesn't take into account the footprint of the physical materials of the billions of computers, or the domestic energy used to power them.

So even the decision to use Skype and email to collaborate with local partners in Girona, and to set up this blog, has a definite and definable impact. There is no room for feeling righteous.

Sometimes all this feels like a profound loss of innocence. There is so much I would rather not know, and now that I know it, I don't really know what to do with the knowledge. At the university where I work, I mention to colleagues that I'm working on a project in Girona, and they assume I'll be flying over - it seems to be expected of academics that we clock up airmiles as a token of professional acheivement. When I say I am not going, and that is the point of the exercise, I feel like a crank, or a spoilsport. And on a day like today, when a cold, wet front is blustering in from the west here in Glasgow bringing driving rain and a leaden sky, while Girona basks in spring sunshine, and I could be hanging out there with some new friends, I think I probably am a spoilsport.

But on the other hand, challenging my own assumptions about how I work, and how I want to operate in future, is a good shakeup.

I've been reading Suzi Gablik 'The re-enchantment of art' again. Published in 1991 it now seems extraordinarily prescient. Writing more about this is for another day, however.

Carbon Neutral Myth

Download pdf

Links

European Pollutant Emission Register

Carbon Trade Watch

Strange Weather

London Air Quality Monitor

Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

Carbon Tracker

The Age of Stupid

Trouble in the Air

Grow Your Own Air

Have a look at this presentation

How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air

So, according to Meattle's study, we apparently each need about 4 good-sized Areca Palms and 6-8 big 'Mother-in-Law's' tongue plants to keep soaking up what we breathe out and pumping oxygen back into the air. And that's just for breathing. This presentation really brought it home to me how something we take so much for granted - the air we breathe - is being constantly generated by the plants around us.

I was reminded of a phrase written by Patrick Geddes over a hundred years ago (1854-1932) which I just looked up to quote in full here.

'This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have the strange idea that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass; and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests'

Carbon Calculus

I've been researching online carbon calculators to check how much CO2 they say my flight to Girona would emit. The figures range from 0.35 tonnes to as much as 6.35 tonnes return. I guess it depends on how guilty they want to make me feel, or how much 'offsetting' they want me to buy. If the highest ones are true, that's an awful lot of breathing - we'll have to extend this project to last 20 years!

Some of these sites will sell you a bunch of trees or something green to make you feel less guilty. How many trees depends on how much carbon you've pumped out. Here's one of them.

http://www.co2balance.uk.com/


And here's a site that's done a pretty extensive survey

www.ecobusinesslinks.com/carbon-emissions-test-flying.htm

According to this survey around 30% of the sites actually underestimate what emissions will be - so it seems my year of breathing is too short after all! Twenty Years of Breathing is quite possibly nearer the truth.

Mindfulness of Breathing

The Mindfulness of Breathing is a very simple and profound meditation, practiced in many spiritual traditions. It is simply becoming aware of the breath as it moves in and out of our body. From the moment we are born to the moment of death we are in constant exchange with our world.

Working in collaboration with students in Girona, a meditation space will be set up in the cloister of San Domenec. We would like to invite the people of Girona participate in this project. Our hope is to create, for the week of the exhibition, a peaceful space into which people may come and sit. We hope that guided meditations will be run by local Buddhist and Yoga centres, and other local groups. Visitors will be invited to enter this space and spend a little time quietly observing the breath, and contemplating how they might bring their lives more into ‘natural balance’.

A record will be kept of the number of participants and length of breathing, which, at an average of 0.72g per person per minute, will be added up at the end of the exhibition.

Any remaining CO2 from the ‘Year of Breathing’ will be donated to the people of Girona for the purposes of meditation, jogging, singing, blowing up balloons, laughing or sex.

Thanks to Elisa Brandi for the photo of San Domenech Cloister - sorry you got locked out of your flat in the process!

How much CO2 do we each breathe out?

Using a standard online carbon calculator (the kind that sell you some trees to ‘offset’ your emissions, so you don’t feel so bad about flying) I worked out that my travel by air to Girona from my home in Scotland would produce 0.3 tonnes of CO2. Our own bodies are intimately involved with this process of exchange with the atmosphere. The National Lung Health Education Programme estimates that we each breathe out around 400ml CO2 per minute, net. When I added this up, it works out that a flight from Glasgow to Girona produces the same amount of CO2 emissions as one year of exhalations for one person.

So instead of using up a year of breathing by flying to install my work, I am donating my ‘carbon budget’ 0.3 tonnes of CO2 to the people of Girona for the purposes of breathing.

http://thinkearth.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/how-much-c02-do-we-each-breathe-out/