At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/
I removed Chrome from my Mac a couple of weeks ago. This article makes me glad that I did.
QuoteAt Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push.
The BBC program More or Less always asks one question when presented with a statistic: Is that a big number?
For perspective, a 747 flying from SFO to Paris, will generate about 255 tonnes, but because of radiative forcing effects, that's the equivalent of about 500 tonnes emitted at ground level.
So this is the equivalent of between 12 and 120 flights from SFO to Paris.
There are roughly 5000 to 8000 such flights per day.
In total, counting short flights, air travel accounts for roughly 2.4 million tonnes per day, but again because of altitude effects, that doubles impact, so it's the equivalent of 5 million tonnes per day.
That comes out to about 59 tonnes per second or 3472 tonnes per minute.
So this thing that Google is doing is equivalent to somewhere between 103 seconds and 17 minutes of air travel emissions.
To say the "climate costs are insane" is to divert people's attention from the big levers we can move.
When we went to France a couple years ago, I added up the estimated climate impact of all the propane we use to heat the house, all the electricity we use to run it, a rough estimate of the electricity used to supply our water and sewer (I serve on the utilities committee so I have rough estimates there - it's not inconsequential).
A single flight from LAX to Geneva was 2.5X our total climate impact from the sources above.