Carbon footprint on telecom bills: a good idea with the methodology criticized


Your next internet or mobile phone bill will include a line summarizing your data consumption and – new – an equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions. Objective: to encourage more sober behavior.

Among the new legal provisions that entered into force on 1er January 2022, appears the obligation for operators and Internet service providers to display on their invoices the carbon footprint corresponding to the consumption of subscribers. Objective of the measure: to make consumers aware of the ecological impact of their data consumption, while digital technology represents 2% of greenhouse gas emissions in France, according to the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications, Posts and distribution of the press (Arcep). Ultimately, predictions even suggest a share of up to 7% of total emissions.

The Ecological Transition Agency (Ademe) obviously doubts this device, which it pushed for adoption, recalling that “when we go looking for data, and in particular video streaming – which represents the largest part of the data flow passing through the networks – we call on material and energy resources, and therefore this generates emissions of greenhouse gas”. The organization hopes that by displaying a CO equivalent2 on the consumption of users, awareness can be raised, which will lead to more sober practices.

More information on invoices

In practice, operators have only one line to add to the invoices, in order to include this equivalent in kilograms or tonnes in addition to the quantity of data transferred, expressed in gigabytes. And professionals in the sector believe that this could, among other things, encourage consumers to use wifi rather than 4G or 5G when they are at home or at work, knowing that wifi consumes less energy than the mobile network. They also believe that this will lead to other greener behaviors, such as settling for lower video quality when streaming.

If this device has everything of a good idea that costs nothing, it is nevertheless sharply criticized by many tech experts, who tackle a method that ignores the positive externalities of digital as well as an unsuitable and faulty calculation method. By positive externalities, we are obviously talking about the emissions that digital technology helps to avoid. Concrete example: conducting a thirty-minute videoconference with an employee living on the other side of the country costs bandwidth and generates emissions, but much less than a trip for this employee to hold the same face-to-face meeting.

An overly simplistic methodology

Regarding the calculation of the CO equivalent2 data consumption, many protest against an arbitrary and biased calculation method. This is what denounced on Twitter Pierre Beyssac, the co-founder of Géat and spokesperson for the Pirate Party. He speaks of a “intellectual scam” and CO modeling2 “messy”. “Fed up with the anti-tech sorcerer’s apprentices who do not understand our professions, destroy everything they touch through Luddism, and grow fat thanks to public aid by surfing anti-tech fashion against ecology before passing absurdities into public policy “, does he also tweeted. For him, without a more rigorous methodology and a targeting of really useful efforts, we are entering a vicious circle wasting time and running the risk of missing our target.

He is joined on the networks by many other experts denouncing calculations that are rigorously impossible to carry out so many factors to take into account. In other words, Ademe’s approach to this new incentive is far too simplistic to be realistic. A loss of credibility damaging to the intended goal. And Pierre Beyssac to criticize this method of calculation – explained here by Ademe – in these words : “Two unsupported simplistic multiplications (formula dismantled x times), one based on consumption (mobile access), the other on a flat-rate basis (fixed access). The evaluation is literally out of the hat.”





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