how instagram is bad for the planet.

It's easy to be online now either for work, facetiming people or shopping. In fact, if you're reading this online blog, chances are you also are on instagram. In 2022, there's an estimated 1.130 billion users on Instagram worldwide, which itself is a huge statistic. The pandemic added approximately 146 million new accounts as well. Think about how easy it is to become a part of this number. It's free to sign up, and all you need is an email and you are given free real estate on instagram. You have your platform, access to friends or customers and a place to go when you aren't sure where to spend your time. You also don't have to pay for the storage space that your videos and data takes up on their servers. (If you have expereince with managing files and data, then you'll know how useful that can be.) There's also no worry of your account expiring (they might be trialling this feature) like Google recently introduced. It also doesn't really matter if you can get your desired username or not, it's easy to make a profile your own.

So, what am I getting to. I am passionate about our planet and it just happened that I'd bump into the account 'Carbon Fingerprint' on instagram. Carbon Fingerprint, much like the name suggests, is bringing awareness to the impact social media and the internet has on the world and considers all the digital techonlogy needed to support that. Carbon Fingerprint is making it more transparent for those who use social media and trying to educate users on their internet usage. On their website, Carbon Fingerprint says, "The internet is responsible for more CO2 eq emissions than the aviation industry and uses more energy than Argentina." Make of that what you will.

The global economy's drive to live off content and send vast quantities of data around the world every second, is partly from human nature's desire for more and due to the invisibility of the damage we can cause as we use the internet. It's very different to a fire where you can see the smoke rise as you keep it going another hour. Everyone's impact of the internet is hidden, and we are not alerted to the pollution or energy use as we use it. It's so easy to continue and we see no harm in our actions so each of us continues.

I am presenting this to those who are interested in this idea but I also know it's not as easy as asking everyone to do this and switch from Google to Ecosia or cycle instead of drive and many, many other changes. I like the intention of Carbon Fingerprint and think it promotes thinking more about sustainabilty. And how we ourselves use energy and the internet and at least think about the impact of watching that next YouTube video.

Carbon Fingerprint offers the chance to plant trees to offset that impact. But perhaps less scrolling is an easier solution, and something that we can immediately do. And I think on the whole it's really something we should aim to improve and reduce our annual consumption, especially if we aren't really doing anything on it. I hadn't thought about my internet usage much before this but I saw Harizson Osterfield talk so passionately about Carbon Fingerprint and how much instagram contributes to the global energy consumption - equal to the 6th most energy hungry country, similar to Brazil - and it is rising all the time. Perhaps we can make our scrolling climate positive or at least a couple of days a year we could do without it.