Page 33 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

1 CARBON, CAPITALISM, COMMUNICATION 15

for 20% of total oil consumption and 15% of the carbon budget needed to
keep global warming below the internationally agreed level of 2 °C (World
Economic Forum 2016: 7). Plastics are produced and disposed of in a
number of other areas of economic activity, but the contribution made by
communications sectors needs to be included in any full analysis of the
connection between media and climate crisis.
As Vincent Mosco points out in his contribution to this volume, with
the expansion of cloud computing and the rapid development of artificial
intelligence, communication systems are likely to make greater calls on
energy and scarce resources in future, increasing their contribution to the
climate crisis. The transfer of user data from flash drives and other portable
storage devices to the massive server farms that constitute the ‘cloud’
significantly increases demand for power to operate the facilities and water
to cool them. The increasing application of robotics and artificial intelli-
gence to productive processes and the Internet of Things, which connects
an increasing range of ‘smart’ domestic machines and devices to com-
munication networks that collect and analyse data they transmit on patterns
of use independent of the volition and control of their owners, will again
impose substantially increased demands on network capacity and power
supplies.

THE PRESENT COLLECTION

Section One: Contested Futures
The collection opens with interviews with two of the key contributors to
contemporary debates around the causes of climate crisis and the actions
required to address it.
In the opening chapter, Michael E. Mann, architect of the iconic
‘hockey stick’ graph, mentioned earlier, demonstrating the acceleration of
global warming, reflects on the responsibility of scientists to enter the
public debate and on his experience of being a target of attack from climate
change deniers. His most recent work, The Madhouse Effect, sees him
teaming up with political cartoonist Tom Toles to satirise the twisted logic
of denialists.
In Chap. 2, the prominent Canadian writer and activist, Naomi Klein,
whose best-selling book This Changes Everything (2014) laid the blame for
the present climate crisis firmly at the door of unrestrained capitalism,