The digital carbon footprint and the rare metals war
We talk with Guillaume Pitron about the hidden face of digital transformation, rare metals, dark cloud, information highways and who owns our data.
Sonia Priwieziencew: What was your most important or shocking discovery while working on the book „The Dark Cloud: The Hidden Costs of the Digital World”?
Guillaume Pitron: I was very surprised to discover the existence of an infrastructure that is absolutely essential to our lives, that is everywhere, that we depend on every second or minute of our lives, but which is completely invisible to us. It is under our feet, under the surface of the sea. Eventually it will be in space, but so far away that we won’t see it.
What impressed me the most was that we can’t see it. We can’t feel it, we can’t touch it. The paradox between the fact that it’s everywhere, that it has become indispensable – it is as the NGO Greenpeace says, the biggest thing ever built by man – and the fact that we don’t have the slightest idea of its existence. We’ve never been inside a data center, never seen an underwater cable, never seen a communications satellite. I was surprised by this complete discrepancy.
There are other things that are very surprising, such seeing mines, especially graphite mines in China. Here, too, there is a huge paradox – we have a contrast between this emerging very modern technology, the technologies of the future, and the mediocre conditions of resource exploitation to produce these technologies. This paradox is striking and can only be seen by going to China.
What also surprised me, and this will be my last point, is that the data must be cold. Lapland is one of the areas of interest for digital companies that store their servers in places where it is naturally cold.
I learned that our Facebook and WhatsApp data are stored in northern Europe, among other places where the Internet seeks cold.
This infrastructure you are talking about…, what does it look like? Is it cables, hangars, data centers? Who owns it? Is it governments or big companies?
First of all, infrastructure means industry. When we talk about the Internet, we talk and think about services, but actually, to create services, you need industry. Industry is construction, factories that make cables, factories that build ships that lay cables. Who owns it? It is owned by many players.
One of them, of course, is the public sector, which has traditionally been the first owner of these industries, because public resources were needed to implement them, especially in the case of cables. And then, gradually, we are seeing the emergence of private players in this sector, in the form of large companies, especially Internet companies such as GAFAM: Google, Amazon and Facebook. Companies that own the „cloud” or data center. These are the industry players who are able to build huge hangars to store data.
Some companies also own cables now. In particular, Google and Facebook, and now Meta, have a strong presence in the cable sector because they want to control the information highways. It’s a bit like a if car company, such as Renault or Peugeot, would decide to buy the highways in the country where its cars are driven.
Increasingly, Google and Facebook not only want to own the data – the data we exchange on the Internet is their property, which they turn into advertising services – but they also want to own the information highways, the cables along which the data travels.
It’s a way for them to control the technical side of the process to make sure there’s no disruption in traffic.
My comments are fairly general, as I would have to go into the details of the various industries, but we are indeed seeing more and more private players stepping in to manage infrastructure that is almost a common property. Not a common property in the legal sense – but my point is that all the connections of our digital lives completely depend on this infrastructure. In other words, if the cables stop working tomorrow, we have no alternatives. That’s what is interesting – to see the power of these corporations in relation to the governments of individual countries, and to think about the consequences.
Exactly, this was one of my questions: what impact can this situation have on the geopolitical relations in the world?
These are complex issues, but they primarily relate to the sovereignty of states. How a country is connected to the global network, what is its territory, its infrastructure, puts the country in a position of greater or lesser independence.
If you don’t have data centers on your territory, it means that the data you produce is not with you and you don’t own your own data.
For governments to retain sovereignty, data should be stored as close to consumers as possible, so that the French, for example, can own their own data.
The same goes for Poles. If the data of the Polish social security system, the Polish police or the Polish intelligence services are not on Polish territory, this delocalization, the uncertainty of their geographic location, raises the question of sovereignty. If the data goes to a U.S. company’s data center on the East coast of the United States, one can imagine the risk of espionage, of being used by another country for geopolitical purposes.
Is this the case today? In other words, we are not sure if governments are the physical owners of this data, since most of it has been transferred?
This question comes up almost daily. In France, for example, we discovered that at one point the French government signed an agreement with Microsoft, which offered „cloud” services, Microsoft Azure, in its infrastructure to store French data, relating to social security. This raises questions.
The French social security system stores information about the health of every citizen. Although the data is stored in France, it is managed by an American service provider. And that raises questions about sovereignty.
So when you said in one interview that data is the „black gold” of the future, was that what you meant, or something else?
I’m not the only one who said that, nor am I the one who came up with the term….
If we want to understand the environment in which we live today, we see how much value there is in knowing about people, about countries, about what they like… We live in an information society and economy. There is a gradual change in the creation of wealth, which we have already seen for several decades, where in fact the worth of raw materials is decreasing. On one hand, a farmer today does not earn much. On the other hand, someone with very, very specialized knowledge of the agricultural sector earns much more. Those who work with materials earn less, but those who work with knowledge earn much more.
So we can make a parallel between materials and data, which in a sense becomes material itself. Knowledge is not a physical material, but it is strategic in nature. The questions for governments are: where to find this knowledge, who will capture it in the form of data, who will use algorithms to transform it into information, and who will use it to offer services and gain technological advantage?
Mastering data from the moment it is captured to the moment it is used is the strategic key for our society today.
Coming back to this material aspect, which you also write about in your book „War on Rare Metals,” let’s talk about the fictional dematerialization of digital technology. We have the impression that it’s all very intangible, very virtual like the „cloud,” for example, while you show in your book that the opposite is true. All this requires huge investments, infrastructure, rare metals and mines. Is this idea of a dematerialized digital world with no environmental impact something we are being intentionally told?
I don’t know if I’m an expert on this, but I see that in this idea of „dematerialization” is often at the center of the marketing of all Internet players, because behind it is the idea of ease and fluidity. I don’t think they are talking about the environment. I don’t think they’re saying you’re dematerialized, so you’re not polluting the environment, and at least in the early days of the Internet, that was unlikely to be the intention. I think the word was invented to make people want these services, which ultimately means less paperwork. It’s the aspect of getting rid of paper, getting rid of all the complexity of daily life associated with paper and entering a world that is simpler to manage and more seamless.
We can take as an example the dematerialized to some extent administration I witnessed when I was in Estonia. This is an administration that is becoming more accessible every day. You don’t have to stand in line at the office. You can just go online and submit a dematerialized application to get a service that shows up and that you can access quickly. I think this is more about simplification.
The ambiguity arose because the word „dematerialization” created ambiguity around the concept of ecological impact. However, I don’t think this was intended from the beginning. Just as the word „cloud” was not intended from the beginning to make you think there are no data centers. It was just a marketing word meaning simplicity. You see, you always have access to your data because the „cloud” is always close to you. However, this created another ambiguity, and I don’t think GAFAM recognized it from the beginning, which was precisely their „dematerialization.” And suddenly there was a question about their actual physical, material impact on the environment. Now the industry is also beginning to grasp this message.
Let’s move on to something very concrete in terms of material resources – smartphones, which are at the center of the digital world, let’s talk about the importance of smartphones for the environment. You said that there are about sixty metals in each smartphone. This must have a huge impact on CO2 emissions?
First of all, phones bring us face to face with another kind of pollution that we never talk about, which is not CO2 emissions. We often view our green conversion only in terms of CO2 emissions. This is more or less the only criterion, or at least the main argument we use to see if what we are doing for the planet is good.
In fact, the phones themselves emit no or very little CO2, even at the construction and production stages. The CO2 emissions in this case are due to the fact that metals are required for production. It is their extraction that emits CO2.
The real problem with phones is the raw material from which they are made and the difficulty in obtaining it.
The key material used in phones is quite lightweight. Paradoxically, obtaining it is very complicated.
A lot of work has to be put into mining to get these metals, which are extremely efficient and allow the phone to be miniaturized. Although the phone is very light, we don’t realize that the raw material needed to produce it, the material and rocks moved before refining, the water needed to refine them all have a cost.
So we need to shift our attention from simply looking at the CO2 that phones can emit to the raw material needed to make these small objects, and accept the counterintuitive observation that in fact the lighter and more miniaturized the phone we want to make, the more material is paradoxically needed. To miniaturize a phone, you need metals with unusual physical and chemical properties that occur very diluted in the Earth’s crust, and to extract and process them, you consume even more resources.
This is the real pollution generated by smartphones, material pollution, with all the effects associated with mining, including, of course, CO2 emissions. Mine operations emit CO2, but they also cause soil pollution, water pollution, loss of biodiversity. Before a mine is open, there is a loss of biodiversity. We do not see this pollution. By analyzing the environmental impact of smartphones in this way, we open ourselves up to a different way of looking at our environmental impact, not just in terms of CO2, but with other criteria. This is a much fuller and richer vision of the impact of human activity on the Earth.
And what about the transition to green energy – solar panels, electric cars, wind… is it the same problem as with smartphones, the problem of the resources needed, the metals to produce them?Here, too, we are not aware of the real consequences?
This is exactly what I mean. In other words, we have technologies that are said to be clean because they actually emit very little CO2 during the exploitation phase. But once again, we look only at CO2 and say that these technologies are clean. Meanwhile, we don’t take into account the CO2 that may have been generated during the production phase: extracting metals from the ground, refining them using electricity produced from coal.
In fact, we have the illusion that „it’s green,” but that’s because we’re only looking at the using, not the production phase.
The goal of these technologies is to produce the same amount of electricity with a solar panel or a wind turbine as with coal. In fact, much less oil is needed, but much more metals. In the same way that it takes much less oil to power an electric car than a gasoline car, but it takes much more metals. So we need to look at other types of pollution related to other resources. It’s not just CO2 pollution.
You are right to draw this parallel, because digital technologies and green technologies are based on the extraction of the same metals. They are the same. A cell phone battery is like a small battery for an electric car. It’s lighter, but it requires the same metals: lithium, graphite, cobalt, copper… So the problem is similar, and above all, other forms of pollution that we too often ignore should be looked at the same way.
That’s clear, but let’s try to sum up the situation: then can this digital world, the transition to digital technology, be in any way reconciled with the idea of green environmental transformation? Digital technology is said to already consume 10% of electricity and produce 4% of CO2 emissions. So where does this lead?
Well, I think it is potentially reconcilable, and that we should not deny or underestimate the positive impact that digital technology can have on the environment. We need to keep that in mind.
If I talk to you now via WhatsApp, I don’t have to fly all the way to Poland, in which case I would emit more CO2 than talking on the phone. Another positive example is subscribing to the services of a company like „To Good to Go”, a platform that connects the seller of tomatoes that are about to be thrown in the trash and the buyer of tomatoes who would like to buy them at a lower price. The platform puts supply and demand in touch with each other and helps avoid waste, which in turn means less deforestation to grow crops, less pesticides, less fertilizer and less transportation of crops. Absolutely all of this represents a huge gain. I give examples that show that we should not underestimate such positive effects.
However, I’m also looking at the CO2 impact of a tool like ChatGPT4. Figures are starting to come out about what ChatGPT using or training means. Already the use of ChatGPT3 is having an extremely high impact, especially in terms of CO2 emissions, and we believe that the impact of ChatGPT4 would be at least ten times that of ChatGPT3.
So if you’re asking me whether today’s digital technology is entirely for the benefit of the planet or the opposite, I don’t have a definitive answer; however, I have a strong concern, so my intuition tells me, that today’s digital technology is accelerating global warming rather than helping to combat it. I’m not saying this with absolute certainty, I’m just saying that I strongly fear that the balance is tilting in a negative direction, especially in light of new services: 5G, Internet of Things, ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and so on.
One of my questions is specifically about artificial intelligence. This is perhaps a bit more of a philosophical question… How do you see the future of artificial intelligence, the fears, the hopes, the idea that artificial intelligence will be able to save us?
First of all, I would be careful about making any expert statements about artificial intelligence. I’m not a computer scientist, I’m not a physicist. So let me ultimately link this question to the environmental issue.
In my book „Dark Cloud „I devote an entire chapter to artificial intelligence in the service of the environment, because this concept really has very far-reaching implications. I discovered during my investigation for the book that there is an idea to create an artificial intelligence that could make public policy decisions for us. We call it „green artificial intelligence” or „green general artificial intelligence.” It’s kind of science-fiction, wishful thinking.
The head of Silicon Valley and some Silicon Valley players are selling the idea that the fight against climate change, against global warming, is too complex, that it has created too many criteria for action, that we humans, with our small brains, are not smart enough to deal with such a complex phenomenon.
They argue that we need to accelerate digital technology so that we can generate more and more data. Data that can be used to run deep learning artificial intelligence that would become so intelligent that it would eventually be able to make environmental policy decisions for us.
It’s a fiction, but let’s look a few years ahead, when OPEN AI releases the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fifteenth, nineteenth versions of ChatGPT. If I then ask ChatGPT19 how to save the planet from global warming, we may want to trust ChatGPT. We’ll tell ourselves that this artificial intelligence is so deep, so powerful, that it finds answers that we can’t find on our own
And if ChatGPT tells us, you have to do this, this and that, well, maybe we will gradually believe in it.
The idea of Silicon Valley, some Silicon Valley players, will be to draw this reasoning to its logical conclusion, saying that we must give machines and algorithms the authority to find solutions for us. This is all in the service of the planet, of course, but ultimately also in the service of the expansion of the digital universe.
Here we see the intersection or point of contact between two very different worlds. On the one hand we have the world of artificial intelligence – and artificial intelligence is not concerned with environmental protection, in this world we don’t care about that at all; artificial intelligence is primarily a matter of geopolitics, balance of power, it’s a matter of money. On the other hand, we have the world of caring about the planet, the environment. At this intersection is the argument that we shouldn’t stop artificial intelligence to reduce CO2 emissions, but that we need to accelerate artificial intelligence that emits CO2 itself, expecting it to be more profitable in the end. While risking that humans will ultimately remove from themselves any responsibility for decision making. I find this extremely interesting and, of course, potentially dangerous.
Thank you. All of this is fascinating, and your answers are very balanced. You do not take sides easily.
I hope that is my strength. I try to present things in a somewhat nuanced way, and I know that readers can appreciate that, too.
In any case, it’s very interesting. The next question is perhaps a bit outside your area of research, but looking at another aspect of environmental policy, please say whether democracy, Western values, make it easier or harder to deal with civilization problems such as environmental transformation? Is it easier to implement such changes in democratic countries, or, for example, in an authoritarian regime like China? How do you see it?
We actually have two opposing visions of the world here, which have often been discussed, including in a French report.
On one hand, we have the view that, the needed energy transition is so radical, that the only way to make it possible in the short time frame imposed on us is to leave people no choice as to how and what agenda to pursue. As we have seen, this is the line of thinking that has been adopted by the Russian government, for example. I don’t know how the Chinese will act, but it is clear today that if the Chinese ever want to make a transition in a short period of time, it will be a way to effectively promote an autocratic regime that gives direction and no choice.
On the other hand, we have another school of thought, which originated in Western countries, according to which environmental transformation can only work if it is democratically accepted. And this is the whole philosophy behind the Citizens’ Climate Convention that took place in France. Citizens representing the French people were drawn and asked to consider ideal solutions. The philosophy behind this is to give the ecological transformation the seal of representativeness and democratic legitimacy. The assumption is that once this transformation is accepted by all, it will have a better chance of being implemented. It will have less opponents. These are two opposing views.
So we can see the question of our values in the approach to the energy transition. There are two opposing political visions, and there is a war on values, on the means we can use to achieve the goal.
China has a tough argument. After all, which country in the world has been able to undertake metal mining on such a scale to produce panels? Which country produces green technologies? China.
It is China that produces the metals and it is China that refines most of them. In any case, they are the leader in this segment. They currently produce the most solar panels, the most electric vehicles and the most batteries for electric vehicles in the world. It is also one of the countries with the largest installed wind power capacity in the world. So, if I had to give one example of a country that has made the energy transition in terms of size and relative market share faster than others, it is China.
In Western countries, we could not impose the creation of mines. And yet these mines are essential for the energy transition. So couldn’t China argue: let’s look at what we did, our vision. We didn’t have to look at the polls and wonder if we would be re-elected in the next election. Let’s look at how this political stability has allowed the mining sector to flourish, benefiting everyone around the world.
China now has a striking force in the production of green technology that benefits everyone, as we also benefit from cheap Chinese panels. It is because they are cheap and of low quality that we can put them everywhere, and thus facilitate the market penetration of solar panels. It’s a model with autocratic tendencies, but one that has made it possible to accelerate a transformation that would be much less developed than it is now. I think this is a real argument for China to convince other countries to follow the same path
At the same time, as you rightly point out, mine-related pollution has been transferred to China.
In fact, and this is China’s hypocrisy. But at the end of the day, we all have our own hypocrisy, and there are discussions, which I described in my first book, between Chinese and American manufacturers, where one of them says to the other, „You’re disgusting.” The Chinese responds, “Yes, but it’s not my pollution, it’s yours.” In the same way, deforestation of the Amazon is partly my deforestation. The Brazilians may say, ‘Listen, you are attacking the deforestation of the Amazon, but we remind you that it is to plant soybeans, and soybeans feed cattle, and beef goes into the stomachs of Europeans.’
So, in a sense, we in the West are also becoming aware of this reality, particularly through the regulations on imported deforestation[1], thanks to which we now make sure that coffee, cocoa and tungsten, to name just a few raw materials purchased by Europeans, are not produced as a result of deforestation in the Amazon. It’s a way of taking responsibility for deforestation, which ultimately belongs to us. The same goes for what we call the externalization of metal costs, because at the end of the day the car is clean, I am clean, just because someone else has to be dirty on the other side of the planet.
This issue is starting to be better understood by Europeans with the emergence of so-called ESG standards – environmental, social and governance. Europe is increasingly demanding that finished products contain ‘ESG metals’, which could be mined on the other side of the planet, but under conditions that respect people and the environment.
Metal is still produced on the other side of the world, because it would take time to re-establish its production in Europe, but even if it continues to be produced elsewhere, we are raising the production standards that must be met in order for metals to enter Europe.
This is a way to take responsibility. This creates a paradox: a greener world will be more expensive. Are we willing to pay more to be greener? I’m not sure…
In this context, as ordinary citizens, in Europe, in Poland, in France, for example, what should we ask of politicians, of companies and of ourselves?
First of all, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do the ecological transformation – because people have often tried to abuse my words in this way. What should we ask? Above all, we must ask to undertake this transformation.
I prefer a world dependent on metals than on coal and oil. The question is, how do you do it? There are, of course, geographical issues. How to take responsibility for part of this production, where should it be located, should we transfer it? I think that might be a good solution.
I would therefore ask politicians to look at the territoriality of these mines. I would ask questions about the related technologies and, in particular, the acceleration of the recycling and circular loop economy related to metals. In fact, the most important issue today will be recycling. And the circular economy is a huge, necessary update that needs to be implemented.
I would also like to raise the issue of social justice. This transformation will cost some of us more than others, and the question arises how the effort will be shared.
Not everyone can afford to buy an electric car today, it is very expensive. So one of the issues that will arise is the ability of our economies, with the right tax policy, to balance the financial effort so that this transformation, which is costly, does not hit the middle class. This is a real challenge to social justice.
Thank you. That’s a convincing approach. You present a global, comprehensive and nuanced view of these issues.
My last question has nothing to do with the rest, but we have many journalists in our organization, and you are a role model in this area, you have received many awards. The question is: what do need to become a good investigative journalist? What features are important? What advice can you give?
I don’t know if I am a role model, but I have discovered it’s a long-term job.
If you want to do investigative reporting, it is a complicated job because it is expensive, can be poorly paid and takes time. First of all, I think you need the means to be a marathon runner, not a sprinter. If you are a sprinter, you will run out of steam and you may be disgusted with the competition. You have to be a marathon runner and think long-term, even if it means taking extra work.
Nowadays, journalists often need to have extra paid work that allows them to sustain themselves in order to actually cover the distance, have the necessary peace of mind to conduct investigations in the long run – that are not necessarily well paid. You really have to ask yourself the question about the economic model, but once again it is based on the philosophy of the marathon runner, not the sprinter.
Besides, in presenting my work, I discovered that there is an increasing expectation of factual rigour and that’s something I’ve learned over time – to surround myself with people who help and protect me when it comes to creating information, who make sure I haven’t said anything stupid. You have to surround yourself with guardian angels if you want to conduct a credible investigation and not be criticized for it.
At the same time, I think you can never completely avoid criticism.
That’s true. We are not machines, and that is ultimately good. Finally, there is one more point that I think is important – we are actually expected to be researchers and storytellers. Being a storyteller is very important. Why are Netflix series so successful? Because you hold your breath after the last episode and you can’t wait for the next one. This is only possible thanks to a talent for storytelling. That’s what writers do.
I think in this business you have to be a real writer. Know how to use the techniques of storytelling, novel techniques. Not to tell false stories, but to tell the truth, telling stories to our readers, listeners and viewers so they become as interested in hearing about reality as they are in hearing or watching fiction.
The storytelling technique is very important for attracting attention, so I think you need to put a special effort into it. That’s what I’m trying to do in my books, trying to tell stories. How can we be reality novelists, reality storytellers, reality screenwriters? This is a very important topic if you want to succeed and have an audience now and in the future.
In any case, you are a great storyteller, and the international success of your books confirms it. Thank you very much and I hope your book “Dark Cloud” will soon find a Polish publisher. It is a truly fascinating book that poses critical questions, both existential for our civilization and affecting the everyday life of each of us.
Sonia Priwieziencew
[1] In 2018, France was the first country to come out with a national strategy against imported anti-deforestation (SNDI) to put an end to the import of forest or agricultural products that contribute to deforestation or forest degradation
The strategy is based on seventeen objectives and five main guidelines aimed at developing and promoting knowledge of deforestation mechanisms, strengthening international cooperation, encouraging demand for sustainable products, for example through sustainable public procurement, and encouraging the involvement of economic operators.
Since 2021, SNDI has been enshrined in the Climate and Resilience Act. It has been devoted four articles to enable customs data to be made available to the Ministry of Ecological Transition to improve traceability and deforestation risk assessment tools, to introduce a zero deforestation target in public procurement for the state, as well as vigilance measures for some of the forest.
