The surge in digital activity spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic has fuelled a debate and prompted dire warnings of environmental damage
Eric Masanet, a former researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Santa Barbara, Calif., on June 23, 2021. Masanet is co-author of a report that suggests technology is not an environmental villain.
The giant tech companies with their power-hungry, football-field-size data centers are not the environmental villains they are sometimes portrayed to be on social media and elsewhere.
Shutting off your Zoom camera or throttling your Netflix service to lower-definition viewing does not yield a big saving in energy use, contrary to what some people have claimed.
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