And Another Thing

Martin Wright has been checking out the online action at Second Life - where virtual is not always virtuous, and the carbon count comes home to roost in the real world.

Scarcely a day goes by without some more-or-less stuffy institution announcing it’s setting up shop on Second Life. Companies are falling over themselves to buy virtual islands in this internet parallel universe, reasoning that their staff might feel more like turning up for work in the form of a svelte and sexy avatar, than as boring old them in the boring old office.

Even Sweden, always keen to be a style icon among nations, is getting in on the act, opening a Second Life embassy. In the 1970s they brought us pine - now it’s pixels. Which has to be progress, after a fashion.

“The great beauty of virtual reality is that its environmental impact is diddly squat. Isn’t it?”

Almost every cherished 21st-century activity is on offer in Second Life, it seems, with one exception: carbon offsets. You can flirt, waste money, bunk off work, go to work, drop in on a climate conference, go to Sweden, dear god - but you can’t neutralise your carbon. You’ll look in vain for islands sprouting certified climate-friendly forests; for hillsides glittering with solar panels. But then again, why would you expect them to be there? After all, the great beauty of Second Life, and all its virtual cousins, is that its environmental impact is diddly squat. Isn’t it?

Not any more. The internet might have started out with a pretty slim waistline, as it were, but as the years have gone by and the bandwidths have bulged, it has started putting on the tonnes. All those hi-res downloads and video messaging services are taking their toll, and Second Life is no exception to the trend.

Technology writer Nicholas Carr has been doing some number crunching. The results make uncomfortable reading for anyone who, like me, clings to the fond belief that if it’s digital, it’s green.

“The avatars on Second Life have the same real carbon footprint as the average Brazilian.”

Carr has added up the power consumed in Second Life’s servers, its users’ computers, and various associated activities (such as the powerful air-conditioning needed for the data centre), and concluded that each avatar accounts for a cool 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity - or about the same amount as an average (first life) Brazilian. Which translates to a not-so-cool 1.17 tons of carbon dioxide per year, per avatar. Avatars may not have bodies, says Carr, but they sure leave footprints.

His calculations haven’t gone unchallenged - some suggest he’s overestimating by up to a factor of three. And of course, while you’re checking out all those virtual malls and embassies, you’re not doing something more blatantly damaging to the climate. Like flying to Sweden. Even so, this is a hefty real world impact for something that seems so ephemeral.

Never mind Second Life, at this rate we’ll need a Second Planet. Whatever happened to dematerialisation, to ‘living on thin air’?

Before this gets too depressing, it’s worth remembering that computers (from servers to laptops alike) have the kind of predictable, limited power consumption which is well-suited to small-scale ‘microgen’ renewables. A wind-powered second life has a certain poetic, as well as environmental, appeal…

Meanwhile, Second Life owners Linden Labs could do worse than start mopping up their own footprint by selling virtual offsets. Your second (life) home could boast its own micro-wind turbine; your corporate HQ could be clad in glistening solar tiles. And the Swedish embassy? Surrounded by a new carbon-absorbing tree plantation. Pine, of course.

Martin Wright is Green Futures editor-at-large.
Carr’s calculations can be found at: www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php 

9 March 2007

Martin Wright