It’s a site you may never have heard of, but Low-Tech Magazine (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com) may be the future of the internet, as it begins to reckon with its own threat to the climate.

LTM’s design is minimalist, with its simple pages consuming a fraction of the electricity of an average online magazine page.

And see the “.solar” in its URL? This means that sunlight powers its own server, hosted locally in its owners flat in Barcelona. If it’s been too cloudy outside - well, the site might well go down and be inaccessible, till the cloud cover breaks.

This is how The Atlantic’s Kevin Lozano opens his startling, worrying article about how the internet will have to change. As a result of its exponential expansion, it’s now looming into view as a serious carbon-generator for the environment. And it might have to change in ways that could seem like a ceiling on our cybercultural ambitions.

The owner of Low-Tech magazine is quoted thus: “One of the reasons why the energy use of the internet keeps increasing is that we are always online, and from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, we’re connected….We thought it was important to question always being online. Do we really need to be connected every minute of the day?”

Lozano lays out the current and increasing biospheric costs of the internet:

The internet is inextricably tied to the coming horrors of the climate crisis. It is both a major force behind that crisis and one of its likely casualties.

It is the largest coal-fired machine on the entire planet, accounting for 10 percent of global electricity demand. And the internet’s climate impact is only going to get worse: Around half of the world has yet to log on—a presently disconnected population of more than three billion people eager to begin streaming videos and updating Facebook accounts. The internet’s cut of the world’s electricity demand will likely rise to 20 percent or more by 2030, at which point it will produce more carbon than any country except China, India, and the United States.

As the world gets hotter, as the forests burn and cities flood, our devices will start to fail, too. In data centers around the world, where the vast majority of the internet is stored, cooling and energy costs will rise exponentially.

The electromagnetic frequency that Wi-Fi travels along will be disrupted, mangled by the increased intensity of ultraviolet rays from the sun. In the next 15 years, the coastal tubes and wires (4,067 miles of fiber conduit, to be exact) that transmit Americans’ data will drown under salt water. The materials that prop up the web, such as rare earth minerals, will become harder and harder to come by.

How do we even begin to confront this array of systemic issues? A good place to start is by creating a more ecologically friendly web, along the lines of de Decker’s site and other projects now being prototyped by engineers within the nascent community of sustainable web design. They agree on a few core tenets: Advertising is bad, the growth of video streaming must slow, web pages are too bloated, and corporate surveillance has to end.

Chris Adams, a web designer and climate activist in Berlin, tells me he thinks a green internet must be free of advertising. “Ninety percent of a web page being ads requires servers, and those servers are taking electricity, and that electricity is generated by burning coal,” he says.

Adams has written that the European site for USA Today is a model of efficiency. It removed all of its tracking scripts and ads to be compliant with recent General Data Protection Regulation legislation in the European Union. The site size immediately shrank from 5 megabytes to 500 kilobytes, but it still basically looks the same—there are just no ads.

The leaner site, based on Adams’s rough calculations, saves more energy and pollutes less. Its monthly reduction in carbon dioxide, based on traffic numbers, is the equivalent of a flight between New York and Chicago.

Relatedly, with ads and tracking scripts gone, energy cost and data usage doesn’t just plummet—there are also fewer people looking over your shoulder when you visit USA Today’s website. “Is a climate-friendly internet one in which you’re not surveilled?” asks Tim Frick, CEO of the green digital agency Mightybytes. “I absolutely believe that.”

But a web that is free of advertising is a difficult proposition, because, well, ads pay for most of the internet. Frick says the ad-generated internet is not going to go away anytime soon. He advocates a streamlining of internet process—keeping bandwidth down with more responsible and efficient ad tech, for example. “We have to rethink how we get our information and how we access it,” Frick says.

Still, the web is also getting larger, not smaller, and that will create additional carbon costs down the line. File compression and data management may get more efficient, but it will be very difficult to contain the “tsunami of data” that billions more users will unleash.

Tom Greenwood, the co-founder of Wholegrain Digital, tells me, “We’re living in a golden age of cheap data, and people only start saving water when they think there is a limit on how much they can use.” He predicts that there will be a “rapid transition” away from our current usage trends as data becomes more scarce and more expensive.

Mike Hazas, a computer scientist at Lancaster University in the U.K., is particularly concerned about streaming and its growing data burden, which he believes could be catastrophic. He predicts that videos, “both subscription and advertising based,” will grow “exponentially.”

The internet’s data load will only get more unwieldy with the expansion of the faster 5G wireless network, higher-fidelity products like 4K and 8K video, cloud gaming, and streamed virtual reality. All that means more pollution.

“Beyond 2030,” Hazas says, “we could see the total electricity usage of the internet rise to more than 50 percent of the global usage—which will in turn contribute to global warming and disadvantage large parts of the global population.”

We’ve grown used to communicating in videos, memes, and animation. Most websites are packed with video players, blaring banner ads, pop-ups, elaborate layouts. But the glut of data costs actual energy. And do we actually need any of it?

“Streaming could easily be 10 percent of global electricity by 2030,” says Hazas, “and will that be OK?” In many ways, the campaign to make the web environmentally friendly is also a campaign to make it less wasteful, chaotic, and toxic.

More here. There’s some striking visualisations (collated by Quartz magazine) showing just how much a simple Google search costs in terms of its carbon output.

These are gifs taken from the work of Joana Moll, an artist researcher, who tries to capture the dark side of informatics. CO2GLE (2014) makes an informed guess (research here) about the carbon impact of Google’s main search page and escalates the numbers

And this piece - titled DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST (2016) - also estimates (her workings here) “the amount of trees needed to absorb the amount of CO2 generated by the global visits to google.com every second”.

Make ads bad, stop video streams growing, unbloat web pages, end corporate surveillance. Or, how to make the Net eco-friendly