Discussion: Everything digital is carbon neutral?

Throughout our research and production process, we kept on coming to an odd conclusion about carbon-neutral production. It seemed that the most climate-neutral way to do anything was to do it virtually, in the digital realm.

While committed to the goal of reducing our carbon emissions for good reasons, we found these suggestions to be socially counterproductive. And that the digital realm is not carbon neutral.

 Nevertheless, we were told:

Rather than meet in person, it was more climate-friendly to meet online.
Rather than print a catalog or exhibition guide, we should make an online publication.
Rather than invite speakers and guests to attend our research assembly, it would be better to hold it online.
Rather than have an exhibition in the physical space of nGbK, we could present a virtual one.

The Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline project is an artist-led investigation into carbon-neutral arts production in the United Kingdom. Their first finding is “All pathways towards decarbonisation must first begin to reckon with the climate emergency’s roots in racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018). For centuries, colonialism and imperial industrialisation has undervalued, extracted and commodified planet earth and its inhabitants, creating disparity and inequity worldwide.”

Fully digitalizing the culture sector is a way to preserve the status quo.

We like live events because they foster a public life that is open to chance and possibility. A fully digital program is one where institutional choice erases chance.

There is a value to online events and purely digital printing. But overall, the digital sector is a driver of the same racialized capitalism that emerges from colonialism and the imperial industrialization which caused the climate nightmare we are in.

The counterintuitive logic of climate neutral digitalization is that (to give one example) online conferences have less climate impact than a conference attended by train because the climate math of an hour online is cheaper than an hour’s train ride. Though a train seems far more climate neutral than a digital network, inherent economies of scale make train travel more negative on the climate than online presence. What remains unaccounted for, however, are the scale of servers, cables, and power plants: this view only considers the tiny percentage of energy cost you use while being online. The same applies to train travel, but due to economies of scale, you “own” a larger share of carbon emissions when using the train.

“While technology-based solutions advance climate progress, they also generate 1.4 to 4 percent of global emissions.” Concurrent with this kind of accounting, big tech’s carbon impact is calculated by counting the impact of their production and maintenance costs, rather than the energy infrastructure their products and services rely on. Big tech relies on electricity, but it is not in the “energy sector”; power plants are. Proponents of digitalization [nP2] argue that the more we digitize, the greener we become, based on the digital’s “smart management” capacities. Recent estimates from the World Economic Forum suggest that digital technologies could deliver up to one-fifth of all the reductions needed to achieve the 2050 net-zero goals in energy, materials, and mobility.

The World Economic Forum lauds digitality at length: “Digitalization can offer a range of fixes. For example, covering even the biggest wind farms with a single private wireless network can unlock solutions including predictive maintenance, repair analysis drones and augmented reality engineering. As a result, engineers make fewer trips out to sea and more turbines can be kept at peak output.”

In the world of wind-farm management, it is possible to financially account for most services. But when people meet, strange and wonderful things happen. When people see art not screens, they see and feel more than what can be accounted for. They talk and plan. One effect of critical art and live culture emerges from its radically transformative goal of creating new and just systems. While impossible to account for, history shows us that this goal is not served by the management ideals of the controlled spaces that digitization provides.