The Cairncross Review and a planet-sized elephant in the newsroom

We report on climate change, we lambast the tech industry, but how well does the media act to address its environmental footprint?

The Cairncross Review is the government’s investigation into ‘how to sustain the production and distribution of high-quality journalism in a changing market’. During the call for evidence, experts were asked for their views on everything from the current state of the market and threats to financial sustainability, to the role of tech giants, data and digital ads. And, crucially, how we will know we have been successful.

But, for me, there were a few serious omissions from this discussion.

The elephant in the newsroom

When The Times broke a data story in 2009 that said two Google searches used the same amount of energy as someone boiling a kettle, producing 7g of CO2 per search, it stole the headlines. The claim wasn’t actually true, but the confusion prompted Google to unveil that the correct figure per search was actually 0.2g of CO2.

At the time, former Telegraph tech journo Matt Warman pointed out that 7g per search, a kettle boiled for every two often-pointless queries, would make Google “the Heathrow or JFK of the internet”, because we were collectively making 242 million queries every 24 hours.

A basic calculation using Google’s 2009 figure shows that an average day of searching back then used 48,400,000g or 48,400kg of CO2. That would have fuelled a house for more than three years, a car for 70 days or a 747 jet for just over an hour and a half, according to YouSustain.

And that was a decade ago.

Today, however, it’s actually more like 3.5 billion searches being made using Google by everyone, all over the world, each day. And on top of that, taking my own usage as a benchmark thanks to the latest iOS update, I spent almost four hours yesterday hopping across ‘social networking’, ‘productivity’ and ‘other’ apps, pinging internet hot spots, pages, servers and advertising networks across the globe.

And I’m just one among billions; flicking the switch, feeding the elephant, swiping, scrolling and searching for ‘the things people regret most when they die’, or ‘who is Rebecca Humphries and why did she take the cat?’

Yet the Cairncross Review — with its primary focus on making high-quality journalism ‘sustainable’ — appears to have failed to take the idea in its most literal sense.

Tech giants, tackling the elephant

Since 2010, Greenpeace has been calculating exactly how dirty the energy is that powers our digital lives through its Click Clean reports.

The work takes a comprehensive, data-led approach to scoring the sustainability of everything tech, from ecommerce companies to social media platforms. And to illustrate the true scale of all of this, the total energy consumption of the global IT sector in 2012 was bigger than most countries — behind only China and the United States.

Fortunately in that decade since the kettle confusion, while we’ve all been swiping like we have carbon-trading credit the size of a small country, the internet companies have actually been becoming more energy efficient.

I first covered the Greenpeace research as a technology journalist when, back in 2014, Apple’s full-on purchase of a hydroelectric power station sent it to the top of the clean list, a place it has sustained for three years up to the most recent report release. Google now gets an ‘A’ for its efforts on everything from efficiency, to procurement and advocacy, although big-name brands like Twitter, Netflix and Spotify trail around the bottom of the league.

The tech industry conversation, Greenpeace explains in its latest report, has switched over time from companies focusing on their own energy efficiency and that of the devices they manufacture, to “securing a renewable source of electricity to power data centers”.

They are now ensuring the energy future of the anonymous warehouses in the desert that ultimately feed our now-cloud-based addiction to watching videos in any spare moment — tipped to represent 80 per cent of all digital consumption in just two years. Of course, they’re not doing it out of the love of seeing your face watching cat videos, but they’re doing it.

About that elephant…

For me, one glaring omission from the government documentation and the submissions that have been released by third parties so far, is any reference to ‘the environment’.

‘Financial sustainability’— tick

‘News ecosystem’ — tick

‘News ecology’ — tick

Having an actual planet to report on and from —nope.

This feels particularly naive in light of the latest stark warning from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, plus the earlier Blue Planet documentary that has spurred other industries to start talking and taking action, and the fact that the media wants people to know the most crucial things affecting our world right now.

We knew in 2009, and probably earlier, that the means by which our work is increasingly being produced, distributed, monetised and consumed is not incomparable to the cumulative use of electronic household goods.

It seems ironic that the Guardian, champion-of-all-things-eco sends out a muddled message. On one hand it offers the latest handy tips for worried readers following the IPCC news in the article ‘overwhelmed by climate change? Here’s what you can do’. Yet it fails to acknowledge that encouraging people to read its ‘hot takes’ has its own carbon footprint.

Back in 2014, the Guardian itself worked on a journal article in Digital Journalism, entitled ‘Energy use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Digital News Media’, in which it said this is an:

• “issue of material importance to publishers;
• unlike physical products such as newspapers, the way energy is consumed in a digital news system is determined not just by technical decisions but also the everyday activities of journalists and the newsroom;
• interventions that could reduce such energy consumption often conflict with parallel objectives, such as editorial and commercial”

These are precisely the kind of ‘macro’ issues a government review into the sustainability of news should be looking into; not least because changes made for environmental reasons, as in the case of the tech giants, can be good for things like ‘brand reputation’, the bottom line, and more.

Sizing up that elephant

The Cairncross Review has, for reasons that have already been questioned both directly and indirectly in some public evidence released since the consultation closed, chosen to focus its efforts on the ‘press’.

According to the latest Ofcom figures, the most read ‘newspapers’ in the UK 2017 (ignoring the fact that more popular mediums are actually telly and radio, and that the ‘press’ is conspicuously digital these days) were the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Metro, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph.

And an off-the-shelf ‘sustainable web evaluator’ like EcoGrader, which makes a trusted list collated by the community body for open web standards, W3, can easily tell you things about the environmental impact of these companies, like this:

Scores are out of 100, and red equals ‘not good’, but luckily each report helpfully tells you various areas for improvement, not least that none of the ‘press’ analysed above uses a green hosting company for its website; an easy way to boost the score and reduce environmental impact.

“The current glut of low-quality content on the internet is frustrating to anyone looking for real answers to their questions, but there’s also an environmental impact as well,” explains Tim Frick, the man whose B Corp MightyBytes created EcoGrader.

“The more time you waste looking for answers, the more energy you use. Every click starts a series of interactions between you and servers across the internet, each of which uses a certain amount of energy that in most cases comes from fossil fuels. When you multiply that times the billions of people worldwide who use the internet every day, the impact adds up quickly.”

On Cairncross, the former journalist added: “Any review of the ‘sustainability of high-quality journalism’ should absolutely consider the environment as a stakeholder in their efforts. Exploiting people’s search for answers comes at a high price, given how close we are to global disaster at the hands of climate change.”

The Digital Journalism journal made a similar warning in 2014, referencing Preist and Shabajee, who were writing back in 2010:

“As the global population becomes more and more connected, it is feared that the energy demands of digital media could prove to be unsustainable, even if current trends in energy-efficient computing continue.”

I have asked the Cairncross Review team for the data on submissions made to the consultation so I can see to what extent this planet-sized elephant in our newsrooms has made its way into the collective consciousness of those who care about the sustainability of journalism.

Personally, I’d also like to know what a post-abundance, post-waste internet looks like, not least because it sounds like the exact place where high-quality journalism belongs.

Folks could probably make a catchy internet campaign out of it: ‘Black Wednesdays?’, ‘#NoMoPhoDay?’, ‘Hey, don’t Google it?’, if the whole idea wasn’t a bit like that time Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband wore feminist t-shirts made by women working in a sweatshop.

Ideally, I’d like to see action on this before there are no endangered species left for me to use as laboured rhetorical devices.

Which is 12 years and counting, last time I checked.