Page 73 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

58 J. LEWIS

analytics—could reduce yearly global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) 20%
by 2030 (Gallegos and Narimatsu 2015).

The ephemeral nature of many aspects of media and communications—
with words and images passing unseen through cables and across the
ether—makes these possibilities easy to imagine. Content—information,
culture and entertainment—need no longer be contained in manufactured
objects (on paper, in CDs or DVDs, for example) but can distributed
digitally and directly to a wide array of electronic devices. It is easy to see
how the World Bank and others might be enthused by this virtual potential.
But there is a problem. While digital technology offers exciting oppor-
tunities for carbon reduction, the media and communications industries are
travelling down a very different road. They are not entirely to blame for
this—although they are not entirely innocent either. They find themselves
caught up in and integral to a set of consumerist practices that threaten to
thwart any chance we may have of tackling climate change. These practices
involve consumerist business models (notably planned obsolescence) and
the promotion of a consumerist credo. They define progress in ways that
rely on increasing rather than stabilising or decreasing global levels of
production and consumption. In short, they operate to make catastrophic
levels of climate change more likely.

CONSUMERIST BUSINESS MODELS
For a media and communications industry driven by commercial impera-
tives, the development of virtual digital distribution systems—such as the
internet—has significant drawbacks. This is a sector in which the selling of
content is made more profitable when that content can be manufactured
into objects—whether books, newspapers, photographs, magazines,
records, CDs or DVDs. The growth of digital online distribution upset this
lucrative system of exchange, making it possible to download news, music
and most forms of information and entertainment either cheaply (with
rigorous intellectual property policing and firewalls) or for free.
This has obvious environmental advantages, although it is worth
remembering that online digital communication is powered in ways that
are not so different from traditional heavy industries. As Richard Maxwell
and Toby Miller point out, digital objects and networks still have a physical
presence that requires storage and capacity, which, in turn, needs electricity