Sustainability consultant Will Richardson breaks down what AI and everyday digital actions actually cost the planet. A Google search produces 0.2g CO₂e, an hour of HD streaming 42g, and data centers now emit more than international aviation. AI will drive electricity demand up 15% yearly through 2030, but Richardson argues businesses can cut both emissions and costs by measuring cloud usage, choosing low-carbon grid providers, and auditing their digital footprint.
Chapters
What ChatGPT actually costs the planet. I did the maths. If your business runs on the internet, and almost every business now does, you have a carbon footprint sitting in plain sight that your board has almost certainly never measured. Here is the scale of it. If the internet were a country, its emissions would rank higher than international aviation, higher than every passenger flight on the planet Combined. In the next 8 minutes, I'm gonna give you 3 things: the real carbon numbers for 2026, not the inflated ones you have probably seen shared online; why artificial intelligence is about to make this much, much bigger; and the 3 moves your business should make this quarter, every one of which also cuts your costs. I've spent 25 years in sustainability consulting, and this is one of the most misunderstood Let's fix that. The scale that nobody talks about. When we talk about emissions, the conversation is always transport, heavy industry, power generation. But there is one source that slips under the radar completely, despite being used by 2/3 of the world every single day: the internet itself. The joint World Bank and ITU report puts the ICT sector's share of global greenhouse gas emissions At somewhere between 1.5% and 4%. Even the conservative estimate is at least 1.7%. That is already larger than the footprint of international aviation, and it is growing fast. The driver is electricity. Data centers alone consumed around 415 terawatt-hours in 2024. That is roughly 1.5% of all electricity used on Earth, and the International Energy Agency expects that to more than double by 2030. So here is the shift business leaders need to make. Digital decisions are now energy decisions. Where you host, what you stream, how you build, all of it is a carbon choice. What your online activity actually costs. Now, you have probably seen the scary numbers, the viral posts about how one email destroys the planet. I wanna clear that up because most of those figures are wrong and the truth is way more useful. Here is where credible data sits in 2026. A typical short email emits around 0.3 grams of CO2 equivalent. A standard Google search, roughly 0.2 grams. An hour of HD video streaming, around 42 grams. If those numbers sound small, because they are, they are far smaller than the figures shared back in 2018 because data centers and electricity grids have become dramatically more efficient. The old claim of 10 kilograms of carbon per hour of streaming, that has been broadly retracted. The real figure is hundreds of times lower. But here is the lesson, and this is the bit I really want These actions are still meaningful at scale, but organisations should not obsess over micro-actions and miss what actually moves the needle. There was a famous campaign a few years ago telling people to stop sending thank you emails to save the planet. It got huge coverage, but the expert whose figures it was based on later said it plainly: the footprint of a single email is trivial. Focusing on it distracts from the decisions that genuinely matter. And personally, I think a thank you is better for humanity anyway. So, Cutting digital clutter is a fine habit, but is not the strategy. The strategy is where you host, what you procure, how you measure. AI is changing the equation. Here is what changes everything, and it is the reason this topic is suddenly urgent. Artificial intelligence. The IEA expects data center electricity demand to grow by around 15% every year through to 2030. That is 4 times faster than overall electricity demand is growing. The United States And China account for nearly 80% of that growth. Emissions from data centers' electricity could rise from 180 million tons today to as much as 500 million tons by 2035. But here is the part that makes this genuinely interesting and not just alarming. The same report points out a counterweight. If existing AI applications are deployed well across other industries, they could deliver emission reductions that more than offset the growth in data center demand. In other words, AI could be a net negative for the climate or a net positive, and which one we get is not fixed. It depends entirely on the choices businesses make, which AI use case you pursue, how the infrastructure behind them is powered. This is a decision, not a forecast. What your business should do this quarter. So what do you actually do with this? If you're in food and beverage or media, marketing and advertising especially, your digital infrastructure is not a back-office concern anymore. It sits inside your Scope 2 and Scope 3 footprints. It Increasingly disclosed under SECR and CSRD, regulators are watching it. Three moves, and you can start all of them this quarter. One, measure what you actually use. Get a baseline of your cloud hosting and software emissions across the business. Most organizations are genuinely surprised by what they find. Two, procure with grid intensity in mind. Where your data center physically sits and how that local grid is powered makes a far bigger difference than any individual's person's behavior. This is the high leverage. And 3, audit your digital estate. Lean websites, retired software subscriptions you are not using— every one of those cuts costs as well as carbon. And that is the rare alignment here. Almost every action that reduces your digital emissions also reduces your costs, improves your performance, and sharpens your customer experience. You very rarely get all of those pulling in the same direction. Here you do. So what call to action have we got? Here is the takeaway: the internet is not a side issue in the climate conversation. It is one of the fastest growing sources of electricity demand on the planet, and the decisions that shape it are being made right now in marketing teams, IT functions, and procurement departments. Probably in yours. If this was useful, here is what I would do on this channel. Every week I take one piece of sustainability conversation that businesses are getting wrong, and I give you the real numbers on what to actually do about it. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Drop a comment with one thing: has your business ever measured its digital footprint? I genuinely want to know how many have, because in my experience, It's almost none. And if you are a sustainability professional or advisor and building a referral network of practitioners who do this work properly, the link is in the description. At 51 to Carbon Zero, we help FTSE, NASDAQ, XTRA, and IBEX listed organizations build a credible digital sustainability baseline and fit it into their wider SECR, CSRD, and SBTI reporting. If that is the conversation you need, the details are below. I'll see you next week.
