Christophe wrote:sen-no-sen wrote:Overall and like everything else, the internet has only increased overall energy consumption.
I grant you that it allowed to close video clubs but for the rest there was only one phenomenon of addition.
Frankly if we had to do the pros and cons of the internet the list goes on ...
I think we can safely say that the Internet has STRONGLY reduced energy intensity!
energies-fossil-nuclear / oil-and-GDP-by-country-intensity-energetics-t5022.html
climate-change-co2 / carbon-intensity-linked al-intensity-energetics-t4885.html
The Internet has made it possible to optimize the dissipation of energy with the aim of promoting the development of many economic markets ... which, overall, tend towards merciless growth.
In a second step, the arrival of social networks and 80% of trivialities carried, does not seem to me to be a token of any savings!
I think so: any centralization of service is less energy-consuming (and costly in the broad sense) than dispersion.
Yes and no but in final reasoning, clearly no! Let me explain:
Large monopolistic structures appear following periods of growth in a relatively stable economy.
So it is right to operate a reasoning as you do: concentrating the means is a pledge of savings, but it is above all a pledge of savings ... in personnel, much less in energy *!
On the one hand, such structures appear during periods of energy mismanagement(typically the current period) on the other, the accumulation of internal contradictions in the system means that such businesses can only operate with a low energy cost.
This is essentially the same problem as found in the large food distribution.
Good example but where do you come from?
Optimization (typically the case stated above) at first glance saves staff and more rarely energy *, but this optimization is carried out within a system which invariably tends towards the exponential.
In reality the whole anthropotechnical process is based on this notion: optimizing in order to saturate.
* The cost of the work is not the same everywhere, it is not uncommon for a raw material to be produced for example in Ivory Coast, then to transform in China to be sold in Europe ... it is more optimization of production costs than energy optimization which prevails in most cases.