What is the carbon footprint of a tweet?

In two of my previous posts I mused about payback versus investment as I considered; should I consider an electronic vehicle (EV) and the embedded energy in my 20 year old refrigerator. Both of which ultimately brings me to consider carbon footprint. This is a topic that was very popular a couple of years ago, but it seems to have had its 15 minutes of fame … not totally disappearing, but not a subject of constant debate. Much like trying to figure out the real difference between an EV and a hybrid car, figuring out your carbon footprint can be confusing. Have you tried to calculate your personnel carbon footprint or on any given product in real time in our global economy? By that I mean recalculating associated costs that are constantly changing, price of diesel, labor rates, currency fluctuations, etc. I have considered this dilemma from time to time. Tracking utilities for your house is relatively easy. Gas consumption of your car, if you have a car that reports the mpg, will help you figure out how many gallons you have used over a year. Additionally, the projected embedded energy rating for certain cars is available online. Beyond those parameters, determining one’s carbon footprint gets trickier: If a manufacture tracks the carbon footprint of their product, no problem, you know exactly what it took to make that T-shirt from Vietnam and how it got here. Hopefully in the not too distant future this information will be available for many of our consumer products. Giant chain stores like Walmart are starting to work towards ways of informing consumers about the production history behind their products. 

Let’s consider how to calculate your carbon footprint when you go out to eat:
What is the difference between Burger King and Grille 21, other than quality and the dining experience (to name a few)? What is the difference between steak, free range chicken and pacific salmon? As an aside – my kids usually select the fish (they tell me that when they get to my age they don’t expect there will be any fish left in the sea and that they will probably be eating some form of ‘soylent green’ so go for it while it lasts!) I think they blame me personally for climate change. Anyway, maybe just order a salad, and pass on the imported gorgonzola. Then there is desert – flaming  crème brulee! And where did that coffee come from … halfway around the world? There are numerous resources online offer this type of information. But, if it takes more than 5 minutes to determine the carbon footprint of your evening out I’m not sure too many people are going to bother. Frankly I haven’t, and I don’t want to live in a cave and eat twigs and berries either. So does it come down to an intuition about what the carbon footprint of a particular product or event might be; the lesser of evils? Or do you even care – what difference will one person make? I suggest you be a relatively informed consumer, do a little research, make the best decision you can and move on.

What about less tangible services we use at an ever increasing rate like electronic services, e-mail, web surfing and tweeting. For example, did you know that a tweet has the carbon footprint of .02 grams of CO2? Check out tweetfarts.com ‘share and pollute.’ Many folks I talk to don’t think twice about the carbon footprint of the electronic world we live in. There is embedded energy in buying a new smart phone every year or two, but who cares – we’ve got to have the latest technology! Charging my phone doesn’t cost that much, it’s only around 50 cent a shot. But what about the massive amounts of energy it takes to run those hidden data centers that store all your selfies on Facebook? Data centers currently use more energy than the country of Sweden and it is growing and, sorry, there is no silver lining in the cloud.  I would suspect you have an opinion about power plants, coal versus natural gas versus nuclear but have you thought about the electronic enablers? A massive amount of mostly useless data is constantly being backed up. When will we hit ‘peak backup’? When will it become too expensive to keep storing ever increasing mountains of data that, for the most part, don’t make for a better world? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy web-surfing as much as the next person but can we self-edit the frivolous and focus on the relevant.

If you had to pay to send and store data how would that affect your daily interface with the electronic world? Would you surf less? Would you actually talk to your friends instead of text? There is no back-up required! But for now like so many other things in our lives the carbon footprint is too difficult to calculate and is largely ignored. Ignorance is bliss, or is it? Ultimately there is no free lunch, so just like deciding to ditch your car and take the ‘T’ or ride a bike, one day you may have to decide how many tweets to send in week. How much time (and energy) should you spend texting, sending selfies or pictures of your dinner to your friends? Maybe you will never have to pay to store your electronic stuff, but it has a carbon footprint just like that crème brulee and coffee. So next time you fire up your personal electronic device, think twice about the contribution you are about to make to that massive electronic land fill that someday may bury us all – unless you are using that device to calculate your carbon footprint.