You go online to find something on Google, check your email, Facebook, watch a video on Youtube and through each activity you contribute to the planets global warming crisis. For year’s environmentalists and governments have warned about the effect cars, planes and even cows have on global warming. While we make small efforts to curb our driving, flying, and meat eating habits, we give little thought into the role our Internet usage plays in this global problem.

In a recent mini-doc for Hungry Beast on ABC TV titled ‘How Green Is Your Internet’ writer Dan Ilic highlights that the world’s 44 million Internet servers account for 2% of all carbon emissions each year. That is the same as the aviation industry or a medium size country. The mini-doc also cites that just one second of online video creates 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide. YouTube alone has approximately 2 billion video views every day. 

A study put out by Greenpeace identifies the greenest online companies as Yahoo and Google, while Apple and Facebook score the lowest with most of their server energy sources being coal based. Even though only a quarter of the world’s population is ‘online’, Internet usage is expected to quadruple over the next three years. 

Over the past couple of years, many online users and businesses assumed that going paperless and operating online had a positive impact on the planet. However, online business practices are not as green as once perceived due to the carbon emissions released as the result of operating online servers for websites. Now, companies and all Internet users must rethink their Internet use. 

Due to the steady increase of Internet usage and speed to which websites and videos are available, the solution does not lay in reducing Internet usage but rather in the energy sources used to power the world wide web servers. Some companies, like Google, are taking it upon themselves to become carbon neutral and they are investing millions each year to find and develop green energy production.

So the next time you use the Internet to create an email, send a Facebook message, watch a Youtube video, make sure that you also remember to petition your favorite website to power their servers using green energy instead of coal based emission sources.