THE DARK CLOUD

A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology which reveals not only how costly the virtual world is but how damaging it is to the environment If digital technology were a country it would be the third highest consumer of electricity behind China and the United States Every year streaming technology generates as much greenhouse gas as Spain close to 1 per cent of global emissions One Google search uses as much electricity as a lightbulb left on for up to two minutes It turns out that the dematerialised digital world essential for communicating working and consuming is much more tangible than we would like to believe Today it absorbs 10 per cent of the world s electricity and represents nearly 4 per cent of the planet s carbon dioxide emissions We are struggling to understand these impacts as they are obscured to us in the mirage of the cloud The result of an investigation carried out over two years on four continents The Dark Cloud reveals the anatomy of a technology that is virtual only in name Under the guise of limiting the impact of humans on the planet it is already asserting itself as one of the major environmental challenges of the twenty first century