Carbon footprint of a tweet

 

I am not on Twitter. So, I do not know how good or bad it is. Sometimes I get a forward of  a tweet through some other social media. Then, I start to wonder what is the big deal about tweets? What are the hidden costs of a tweet?

What is the carbon footprint of a tweet, I have wondered. After all, it must take some energy equivalent to send out a tweet from the data centres. Some energy must be required to preserve it in digital form in the data centres too.

Well, I am not alone in this seemingly innocuous wonderment. It turns out that the energy it takes to send out a tweet generates 0.02 grams of Carbon dioxide. With 50 crores tweets a day, a total of 10 metric tons of Carbon dioxide are emitted every day. This data is from a website called http://tweetfarts.com/ . Interestingly the website says, share and pollute. It also says that the carbon dioxide emission of a human fart is almost the same as the carbon dioxide given out when energy is expended to send out a tweet.

But why stop at tweets? There must a carbon footprint cost for Google and Bing searches as well. Even as I write this post, there must be a carbon footprint cost to publish this post. And, then to keep the post alive in the Google data centres. Think about the ebooks in Kindle and other ebooks hosting sites.

There was a social media post sometime back that said that Indians clog the Internet highway with their Good Morning messages. More than Good Morning messages, tweets and re-tweets are accumulating carbon debt from our future generations. This may appear over simplification, but, I believe, it is true.

Should I stop publishing my posts? After all, there is nothing very profound in what I am writing. Is the blog worth borrowing from future generations? Something has to give: my ego, or my earthmanship.