Page 63 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

4 DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT … 47

Green organizations can help initiate and reinforce green routines by
participating in and publicizing ongoing research on ICT labour world-
wide. This is no simple act of posting a link to what’s already known, for
there is no agreement on how to describe and map the global workforce
involved. Some studies suggest that there are over 200 million people in
OECD countries and the Asia-Pacific region alone who work in some kind
of ICT job. Add another 200 million for mining and related work, and
some additional millions for transport, distribution, retail sales and end of
life management, disposal and destruction (Maxwell 2015b). Once
involved in the collective effort to improve data collection and analysis,
environmental organizations could more readily explain how the lives of
workers around the world connect to the deployment of digital technology
for environmental action.
This effort would overlap with two political goals in the labour move-
ment, both vital to the improvement of working conditions in the global
supply chain. First, it broadens institutional pressure to get accurate
information about far-flung and often high-security factories where labour,
especially in the assembly stage, is geographically dispersed via a system of
international subcontracting. 9 Second, acting to improve research on
working conditions would fuse aims of environmental NGOs with union
organizers who struggle to build unions in global ICT and electronics
industries where union membership density is shockingly low. Weak union
representation, probably more than geography, makes it difficult to find
reliable and representative information on workers’ exposure to toxic
materials and other workplace hazards.

INSTITUTIONAL ENERGY CONSUMPTION
It’s surprising that more environmental organizations aren’t as forthcom-
ing about their ICT energy consumption as Greenpeace. Supporters might
not understand the scale of energy consumption associated with ICTs, so
it’s important to remind them that like all consumer electronics, digital
tools of advocacy and activism also need to be plugged into the electric grid
—and that batteries, too, have built-in energy costs in production, usage
and disposal.
According to the International Energy Agency, residential electronics
alone consume about 15% of the total global residential energy in use.
Without any changes to this trend, it is estimated that the residential