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Concerned about your data use? Here is the carbon footprint of an average day of emails, WhatsApps and more

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Thursday, October 31, 2024

Nearly 20 years ago, the British mathematician Clive Humby coined a snappy phrase that has turned into a platitude: “data is the new oil”. He wasn’t wrong. We have an insatiable appetite for data, we can’t stop generating it, and, just like oil, it’s turning out to be bad news for the environment.So the Guardian set me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going.My own carbon tally gets off to a bad start, and it is not even my fault. The email from my editor asking me to try to quantify quite how much data a single person uses in a day is itself contributing to my footprint. If the editor took 10 minutes to write the email – likely, given it was quite detailed – and it took me three minutes to read, and if it was sent from a laptop and received on one, then we have generated 17g of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions already, according to estimates by Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre, and the author of How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.My frantic emails to people asking to speak to them for this story pump out more carbon at a prodigious rate. And though 17g of CO2 is insignificant compared with the 384.2m tonnes of net emissions the UK as a whole is responsible for each year, it all adds up.All those emails and videos and games don’t just appear on our screens by magic. Everything we do digitally involves the vast transfer of data through the internet from one place to another, brokered through datacentres. Datacentres are vast premises full of computer servers that store data. The idea behind them is to reduce what the data industry calls “latency”, the time between you typing in a web address or clicking on an app button, and the content you are requesting being delivered to you. Everything on the internet, every link you click, every video you watch, is physically stored in a datacentre somewhere.Digital sprawl … datacentres and industrial complexes in Medemblik, the Netherlands. Photograph: Merten Snijders/Getty ImagesDatacentres are big business, and vast numbers of them are being built around the world. In the UK, Amazon has just announced plans to invest £8bn over the next five years building new datacentres and maintaining those it already has, “supporting 14,000 jobs annually”. That comes on top of £3bn already spent in the UK by Amazon’s cloud computing arm since 2020. Google is spending $1bn on a new centre at a 133,500 sq metre (33-acre) site in Hertfordshire, and at the end of last year Microsoft committed to £2.5bn of investment in the next three years, more than doubling its datacentre footprint in this country.The reason for this is simple: demand is increasing at alarming rates. Americans used 100tn megabytes of wireless data in 2023, a record-breaking increase of 36% on the previous year – that’s enough to download Candy Crush Saga 265bn times.It is a lot of data, and a lot of energy is required to serve that data to us, plus a lot of water to keep all those servers cool. In fact, Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore are so worried about the energy impact of datacentres that they have imposed moratoria on new developments. When Google announced its environmental impact earlier this year, it revealed its own greenhouse gas emissions had risen 48% in the last five years, and 13% in the last 12 months, largely driven by increased datacentre demand to service its AI needs. Now big tech companies have come up with another solution to try to solve the looming energy crisis: their own nuclear power plants. Microsoft has struck a deal to recommission the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania, Google recently announced plans to build six or seven new small reactors to meet its anticipated energy needs. There’s no way round it: a steady stream of environmental harm is coming from our everyday actions – activities that we often don’t think about in relation to the target of limiting global heating to below 1.5C.“You will run into this pretty much anywhere during the day,” says Alex de Vries, who researches the carbon footprint of our day-to-day lives at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “Digital applications are so deeply embedded in our lives nowadays, it’s really hard to avoid. The thing is, when you’re using them, it’s not like you have something popping up in the screen telling you, like: ‘Hey, be aware, this activity has this carbon footprint.’”Ethernet and power cables plugged into the back of a computer server machine at a datacentre. Photograph: Ellen Isaacs/AlamyDe Vries also runs the Digiconomist website, which tries to track – where possible – the environmental impact of these things. That “where possible” is an important caveat. “It’s incredibly hard to figure out that information,” says de Vries.In the absence of reliable figures from the companies themselves, educated guesses are often all we can rely on. Case in point: estimates of the proportion of world energy use that the internet makes up range from 3.7% to 10%, depending on who is counting. One estimate by Zero Waste Scotland suggests all our online activity generates an average of 8.62kg of CO2 a week (about 448kg a year), or about 30 miles in an average-sized petrol car. But a German estimate (which also includes the emissions created by the production digital devices themselves) says we expend around twice that, roughly 850kg a year.People struggle with two key problems when trying to wrap their heads around their data usage and resultant carbon impact, says De Vries. One: everything is digital, and therefore not tangible. “If you’re holding a pen and a piece of paper, you can get some idea of what might be necessary to make this product,” he says. “But if you’re using a digital application, what’s really going into that to make all of that happen? A lot of people simply will have no clue what that looks like.”The other issue is that the tech companies are really good at making things work. “You probably don’t even know what is in [an application],” says De Vries. You press the button, and the Netflix series starts.Companies such as Netflix are disarmingly honest about their data usage: if you keep your video quality on “low”, you use a paltry 300MB an hour of data on a streaming service such as Netflix. If you want to watch things in HD, though, you ramp up to 3GB an hour when looking at the most detailed scenes. If you are a movie connoisseur, your 4K streaming uses up to 7GB an hour.But while few would argue we should spend less time in front of streaming services, the environmental impact of all that binge-watching appears to be comparatively low. A 2020 analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that watching an hour of Netflix was equivalent to boiling a kettle once: about 36g of CO2.There are other variables to take into account, though: the energy consumption of the device you are watching on, for example (Netflix says 70% of its viewers use televisions, which are more energy-hungry than mobile phones); or how the electricity you are using is generated (nuclear or wind is less carbon-emitting than coal or gas).If you want to gossip about the latest episode with your friends, that also comes with an environmental toll. The average WhatsApp group chat uses 2.35kg of CO2 a week, Zero Waste Scotland calculated. (To blunt the impact slightly, rely more on emojis – which are stored locally on your device – than reaction gifs, which have to be downloaded afresh from datacentres.) Listening to music online also comes at an environmental cost, although it is estimated that you can stream music for five hours before you will emit more CO2 – 288g – than is involved in making a CD in a case. Like many tech companies, Spotify has committed to reaching net zero emissions, in its case, by 2030.Construction work is continuing in Slough, Berkshire, on two huge datacentres for the Yondr Group, a developer, owner and operator of datacentres. Photograph: Maureen McLean/AlamyBig tech companies buy carbon credits and offsets to try to mitigate the impact of their activity, but it’s often seen as a poor attempt at atonement for the environmental impact they cause. There are also questions about the extent to which firms’ reported datacentre emissions are capturing the whole picture. A recent Guardian analysis found that real emissions between 2020 and 2022 from datacentres owned by the four big tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, were likely to be 662% higher than officially reported.The tech industry’s warm embrace of generative AI has complicated things even further. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. Type certain searches into Google and you will be given an “AI overview”, as Google calls them, which summarises key information from the results the search engine finds and presents it in a simple set of bullet points, alongside associated links. And you can’t turn it off. “AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature,” the company says.“Generative AI hasn’t necessarily added very many new use cases,” says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at AI company Hugging Face. “It’s adding more compute and more environmental impacts to existing use cases.” The problem is that we don’t fully know how much. “None of the corporates, and none of the proprietary models, have published any numbers,” she says. De Vries’s research suggests that AI-powered search results use 10 times the power that non-AI searches do.All this is before you get into the conscious use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude chatbot – where you are going to their websites or opening their apps, and taking part. Here, we are also in the dark about how much data, and therefore how much energy and water, generative AI uses. The best information we have is from informed third-party estimates: training GPT-3, a precursor to the current model, used an estimated 5.4m litres of water, according to one academic study, and produced as much CO2 as would be generated by flying between New York and San Francisco 550 times.I recently published a book on AI and as part of that, I have been touring and giving talks about AI’s impact on our world. In my favourite set of slides that I present there is a party trick. To highlight concerns around copyright in generative AI, I ask ChatGPT’s image generator, Dall-E, to produce a depiction of whichever place I’m in, in the style of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.The gimmick always gets a laugh and serves its purpose: it shows how often the AI system has seen that painting by the ability to mimic its brushstrokes. But I always feel guilty. Because each time I do that, whether in Chipping Campden or Vilnius, I’m using data. About halfway through my book tour, I started adding a couple of slides immediately afterwards on the environmental impact of AI.So besides stopping generating bootleg Van Goghs, what should those of us conscious about our environmental footprint do? Luccioni advocates for “digital sobriety”: being mindful about how we use AI. “You don’t need to be using these new AI tools for everything,” she says. “There are applications that are useful, but there’s a lot of cases where you really don’t need them.” The same approach holds true for everything digital: think twice, text once.High scoring? Playing video games at home. Photograph: matrixnis/Getty ImagesYour data dietEstimating how much data your daily activities use is an art not a science, but here are best estimates of how much you are gobbling up online. Listening to a podcast: 20-100MB an hour Watching Netflix: 3GB an hour at HD quality Online shopping: Consider the data size of any images you browse, which can be big, before even thinking of the environmental impact of your delivery WhatsApp text message: 1-5KB a message, on average WhatsApp voice call: 400KB-1MB a minute WhatsApp video call: 2.5-15MB a minute Average pre-AI Google search: 500KB for a text-based search Average post-AI Google search: No one knows … Sending an email: Depends on the size of the message, but about 75KB on average Sending an email with photo attachment: As above, plus the size of the attachment Downloading an album on Spotify: Depends on your audio quality, but around 72MB for an hour-long album Playing a game of Fortnite: Between 45 and 100MB an hour

Vast datacentres are being built worldwide, amid growing concerns about the environmental costs. So should we all be considering a data diet – if not complete digital sobriety?Nearly 20 years ago, the British mathematician Clive Humby coined a snappy phrase that has turned into a platitude: “data is the new oil”. He wasn’t wrong. We have an insatiable appetite for data, we can’t stop generating it, and, just like oil, it’s turning out to be bad news for the environment.So the Guardian set me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going. Continue reading...

Nearly 20 years ago, the British mathematician Clive Humby coined a snappy phrase that has turned into a platitude: “data is the new oil”. He wasn’t wrong. We have an insatiable appetite for data, we can’t stop generating it, and, just like oil, it’s turning out to be bad news for the environment.

So the Guardian set me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going.

My own carbon tally gets off to a bad start, and it is not even my fault. The email from my editor asking me to try to quantify quite how much data a single person uses in a day is itself contributing to my footprint. If the editor took 10 minutes to write the email – likely, given it was quite detailed – and it took me three minutes to read, and if it was sent from a laptop and received on one, then we have generated 17g of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions already, according to estimates by Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre, and the author of How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.

My frantic emails to people asking to speak to them for this story pump out more carbon at a prodigious rate. And though 17g of CO2 is insignificant compared with the 384.2m tonnes of net emissions the UK as a whole is responsible for each year, it all adds up.

All those emails and videos and games don’t just appear on our screens by magic. Everything we do digitally involves the vast transfer of data through the internet from one place to another, brokered through datacentres. Datacentres are vast premises full of computer servers that store data. The idea behind them is to reduce what the data industry calls “latency”, the time between you typing in a web address or clicking on an app button, and the content you are requesting being delivered to you. Everything on the internet, every link you click, every video you watch, is physically stored in a datacentre somewhere.

Digital sprawl … datacentres and industrial complexes in Medemblik, the Netherlands. Photograph: Merten Snijders/Getty Images

Datacentres are big business, and vast numbers of them are being built around the world. In the UK, Amazon has just announced plans to invest £8bn over the next five years building new datacentres and maintaining those it already has, “supporting 14,000 jobs annually”. That comes on top of £3bn already spent in the UK by Amazon’s cloud computing arm since 2020. Google is spending $1bn on a new centre at a 133,500 sq metre (33-acre) site in Hertfordshire, and at the end of last year Microsoft committed to £2.5bn of investment in the next three years, more than doubling its datacentre footprint in this country.

The reason for this is simple: demand is increasing at alarming rates. Americans used 100tn megabytes of wireless data in 2023, a record-breaking increase of 36% on the previous year – that’s enough to download Candy Crush Saga 265bn times.

It is a lot of data, and a lot of energy is required to serve that data to us, plus a lot of water to keep all those servers cool. In fact, Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore are so worried about the energy impact of datacentres that they have imposed moratoria on new developments. When Google announced its environmental impact earlier this year, it revealed its own greenhouse gas emissions had risen 48% in the last five years, and 13% in the last 12 months, largely driven by increased datacentre demand to service its AI needs. Now big tech companies have come up with another solution to try to solve the looming energy crisis: their own nuclear power plants. Microsoft has struck a deal to recommission the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania, Google recently announced plans to build six or seven new small reactors to meet its anticipated energy needs. There’s no way round it: a steady stream of environmental harm is coming from our everyday actions – activities that we often don’t think about in relation to the target of limiting global heating to below 1.5C.

“You will run into this pretty much anywhere during the day,” says Alex de Vries, who researches the carbon footprint of our day-to-day lives at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “Digital applications are so deeply embedded in our lives nowadays, it’s really hard to avoid. The thing is, when you’re using them, it’s not like you have something popping up in the screen telling you, like: ‘Hey, be aware, this activity has this carbon footprint.’”

Ethernet and power cables plugged into the back of a computer server machine at a datacentre. Photograph: Ellen Isaacs/Alamy

De Vries also runs the Digiconomist website, which tries to track – where possible – the environmental impact of these things. That “where possible” is an important caveat. “It’s incredibly hard to figure out that information,” says de Vries.

In the absence of reliable figures from the companies themselves, educated guesses are often all we can rely on. Case in point: estimates of the proportion of world energy use that the internet makes up range from 3.7% to 10%, depending on who is counting. One estimate by Zero Waste Scotland suggests all our online activity generates an average of 8.62kg of CO2 a week (about 448kg a year), or about 30 miles in an average-sized petrol car. But a German estimate (which also includes the emissions created by the production digital devices themselves) says we expend around twice that, roughly 850kg a year.

People struggle with two key problems when trying to wrap their heads around their data usage and resultant carbon impact, says De Vries. One: everything is digital, and therefore not tangible. “If you’re holding a pen and a piece of paper, you can get some idea of what might be necessary to make this product,” he says. “But if you’re using a digital application, what’s really going into that to make all of that happen? A lot of people simply will have no clue what that looks like.”

The other issue is that the tech companies are really good at making things work. “You probably don’t even know what is in [an application],” says De Vries. You press the button, and the Netflix series starts.

Companies such as Netflix are disarmingly honest about their data usage: if you keep your video quality on “low”, you use a paltry 300MB an hour of data on a streaming service such as Netflix. If you want to watch things in HD, though, you ramp up to 3GB an hour when looking at the most detailed scenes. If you are a movie connoisseur, your 4K streaming uses up to 7GB an hour.

But while few would argue we should spend less time in front of streaming services, the environmental impact of all that binge-watching appears to be comparatively low. A 2020 analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that watching an hour of Netflix was equivalent to boiling a kettle once: about 36g of CO2.

There are other variables to take into account, though: the energy consumption of the device you are watching on, for example (Netflix says 70% of its viewers use televisions, which are more energy-hungry than mobile phones); or how the electricity you are using is generated (nuclear or wind is less carbon-emitting than coal or gas).

If you want to gossip about the latest episode with your friends, that also comes with an environmental toll. The average WhatsApp group chat uses 2.35kg of CO2 a week, Zero Waste Scotland calculated. (To blunt the impact slightly, rely more on emojis – which are stored locally on your device – than reaction gifs, which have to be downloaded afresh from datacentres.) Listening to music online also comes at an environmental cost, although it is estimated that you can stream music for five hours before you will emit more CO2 – 288g – than is involved in making a CD in a case. Like many tech companies, Spotify has committed to reaching net zero emissions, in its case, by 2030.

Construction work is continuing in Slough, Berkshire, on two huge datacentres for the Yondr Group, a developer, owner and operator of datacentres. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Alamy

Big tech companies buy carbon credits and offsets to try to mitigate the impact of their activity, but it’s often seen as a poor attempt at atonement for the environmental impact they cause. There are also questions about the extent to which firms’ reported datacentre emissions are capturing the whole picture. A recent Guardian analysis found that real emissions between 2020 and 2022 from datacentres owned by the four big tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, were likely to be 662% higher than officially reported.

The tech industry’s warm embrace of generative AI has complicated things even further. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. Type certain searches into Google and you will be given an “AI overview”, as Google calls them, which summarises key information from the results the search engine finds and presents it in a simple set of bullet points, alongside associated links. And you can’t turn it off. “AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature,” the company says.

“Generative AI hasn’t necessarily added very many new use cases,” says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at AI company Hugging Face. “It’s adding more compute and more environmental impacts to existing use cases.” The problem is that we don’t fully know how much. “None of the corporates, and none of the proprietary models, have published any numbers,” she says. De Vries’s research suggests that AI-powered search results use 10 times the power that non-AI searches do.

All this is before you get into the conscious use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude chatbot – where you are going to their websites or opening their apps, and taking part. Here, we are also in the dark about how much data, and therefore how much energy and water, generative AI uses. The best information we have is from informed third-party estimates: training GPT-3, a precursor to the current model, used an estimated 5.4m litres of water, according to one academic study, and produced as much CO2 as would be generated by flying between New York and San Francisco 550 times.

I recently published a book on AI and as part of that, I have been touring and giving talks about AI’s impact on our world. In my favourite set of slides that I present there is a party trick. To highlight concerns around copyright in generative AI, I ask ChatGPT’s image generator, Dall-E, to produce a depiction of whichever place I’m in, in the style of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

The gimmick always gets a laugh and serves its purpose: it shows how often the AI system has seen that painting by the ability to mimic its brushstrokes. But I always feel guilty. Because each time I do that, whether in Chipping Campden or Vilnius, I’m using data. About halfway through my book tour, I started adding a couple of slides immediately afterwards on the environmental impact of AI.

So besides stopping generating bootleg Van Goghs, what should those of us conscious about our environmental footprint do? Luccioni advocates for “digital sobriety”: being mindful about how we use AI. “You don’t need to be using these new AI tools for everything,” she says. “There are applications that are useful, but there’s a lot of cases where you really don’t need them.” The same approach holds true for everything digital: think twice, text once.

High scoring? Playing video games at home. Photograph: matrixnis/Getty Images

Your data diet

Estimating how much data your daily activities use is an art not a science, but here are best estimates of how much you are gobbling up online.

  • Listening to a podcast: 20-100MB an hour

  • Watching Netflix: 3GB an hour at HD quality

  • Online shopping: Consider the data size of any images you browse, which can be big, before even thinking of the environmental impact of your delivery

  • WhatsApp text message: 1-5KB a message, on average

  • WhatsApp voice call: 400KB-1MB a minute

  • WhatsApp video call: 2.5-15MB a minute

  • Average pre-AI Google search: 500KB for a text-based search

  • Average post-AI Google search: No one knows …

  • Sending an email: Depends on the size of the message, but about 75KB on average

  • Sending an email with photo attachment: As above, plus the size of the attachment

  • Downloading an album on Spotify: Depends on your audio quality, but around 72MB for an hour-long album

  • Playing a game of Fortnite: Between 45 and 100MB an hour

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Opinion: Collaboration, not litigation, can support both salmon and hydropower

We live in a region where both salmon and hydropower production can and do co-exist, writes Scott Simms of the Public Power Council. Failing to find a path forward that supports both is a missed opportunity for everyone who calls the Northwest their home.

Scott SimmsFor The Oregonian/OregonLiveSimms is chief executive officer and executive director of the Public Power Council, which represents more than 80 nonprofit, community owned electric utilities across six Pacific Northwest states, including Oregon.A recent op-ed by Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association’s Liz Hamilton left some key facts out of the conversation about our region’s salmon and our hydropower system (“Back to court, but our regional work to protect salmon will continue,” Sept. 14). It’s true that a coalition of fishing and special interest groups, the states of Oregon and Washington and four Lower Columbia River Treaty tribes requested a federal judge lift a stay in decades-old litigation over how to manage the Columbia Basin. We have long been in conflict with those who believe that dismantling dams on the Lower Snake River – which produce reliable hydropower for the region – is essential to protecting salmon. However, we do not believe that conflict is necessary. Rather, we believe now is the time for the region to focus on shared goals of restoring fish while maintaining an adequate and affordable power system. Instead of endless litigation, we can strengthen programs that protect sensitive environmental areas, improve habitat and deploy new technologies that help fish pass safely through dams. Although there are significant disagreements that will require negotiation, we can make progress more quickly through collaboration than litigation. And there have already been gains. Since Bonneville Dam first began operating in 1938, the number of returning adult salmon and steelhead has tripled, according to fish counts from dams across the Columbia River basin compiled by the University of Washington’s Data Access in Real Time system. While there’s still a lot of work ahead to continue strengthening certain runs, we are witnessing fish populations bouncing back, even with dams in place.At the same time as these fish returns are improving, the states of Oregon and Washington have expanded non-tribal salmon fishing seasons for sport and commercial operations. Fishing groups don’t mention this when they advocate for severely hobbling or demolishing the region’s hydro projects. But the impact of sport and commercial fishing on salmon should not be ignored in a comprehensive discussion about how to protect fish populations. As recently as this month, Oregon and Washington fisheries managers approved an extension of commercial gillnetting operations in the Columbia River. The practice of commercial gillnetting – in which massive nets extend up to 1,500 feet into the river – is so effective at ensnaring all types of fish, endangered or not, that critics have repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought to ban its use. These efforts are in addition to the offshore commercial harvests that happen when trawlers cruise the international waters off our region’s shores, hauling out salmon and other species by the ton every year. These salmon never make it back to their spawning grounds, nor, importantly, to the historic fishing areas where the region’s tribes have rights under U.S. treaties.Meanwhile, the same groups advocating for a return to the courtroom also do not acknowledge the critically important role our region’s clean, renewable hydro system plays in powering homes and businesses and funding salmon recovery efforts. In the heat dome that gripped the Northwest in 2021 and the massive cold snap that hit us in 2024, the hydropower generated by dams was the single largest source of electricity fueling the Northwest, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration Hourly Grid Monitor. These are two extreme events that, because of a changing climate and an increase in electricity dependency, will stress our system even more in the future. Hydropower has long been the backbone of our region’s energy system, and it will be even more critical in the next decade, as electricity consumption is forecast to grow by more than 30%. While many understand that hydro powers our communities and our modern lives, few are aware that the system also funds one of the world’s largest fish and wildlife mitigation programs in the world. The region’s nonprofit electric utilities, which buy their power from the federal Bonneville Power Administration, have collectively paid more than $715 million annually from 2013 to 2023 to fund hatcheries, habitat improvements, predation management and other actions.The op-ed dismisses a 2020 plan for Columbia River operations as putting the needs of salmon last. But that plan, developed over a course of years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, helped deliver a banner year for salmon returns to the region in 2024, while also ensuring a strong hydropower supply that carried us through extreme weather events. This plan set out to balance of the needs in the basin – without breaching dams that coalition members use as a cornerstone for their advocacy.We live in a region where both salmon and hydropower production can and do co-exist. Failing to find a path forward that supports both is such a missed opportunity for everyone who calls the Northwest their home. We in Northwest public power stand ready to avoid a return to the courtroom and to sit down with litigants to do the hard work of collaborating on a solution. We remain hopeful that the coalition groups will join us. Share your opinion Submit your essay of 600-700 words on a highly topical issue or a theme of particular relevance to the Pacific Northwest, Oregon and the Portland area to commentary@oregonian.com. No attachments, please. Please include your email and phone number for verification. If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

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Energy

Meet the small business owners electrifying Maine’s rural coast

In Casco Bay’s remote waters, electric workboats and the aquaculture innovators who operate them are putting marine electrification to the test.

On a sunny, 85-degree day in August of 2025, some 9,300 oysters were loaded into ice-filled containers on southern Maine’s Casco Bay. The boat shuttling them from the warm, shallow waters of Recompense Cove to the marina two miles away hummed quietly. Notably missing: the roar of an engine and the smell of diesel.  Heron, the boat in question, is a 28-foot aluminum vessel that runs on two 100 percent electric outboards, the motors that hang off of small and medium-sized boats. It’s one of the first commercial workboats in the United States to use electric outboards. The vessel officially splashed into the waters of South Freeport, Maine, on July 17, 2025. The moment, though, had been years in the making. It required a coalition of industry-wide partners, a $500,000 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant, and at least that much in matching funds from the operating businesses’ cost share agreement and philanthropic investments through the Rockland, Maine-based Island Institute, the Maine Technology Institute, and others. Altogether, the $1 million private-public investment covers Heron’s $425,000 sticker price and the costs to install two high-capacity shoreside chargers. A portion of these funds also supports data collection and research to assess the viability of electric technology in the greater aquaculture industry.  Willy Leathers is the director of farm operations and owner of Maine Ocean Farms, the mid-size aquaculture business that operates this particular boat. The 10-acre plot he and farm co-founder Eric Oransky tend to on Recompense Cove holds about 3 million oysters. The two farmers are among a growing group of small business owners on the cutting edge of marine innovation along rural and remote parts of Maine’s coast. They’ve been in operation together just shy of a decade, and have seen the aquaculture industry spring up around them in the coves and small islands that make up Casco Bay. Beyond the bay is the wide-open Gulf of Maine, which has been documented as one of the world’s fastest-warming bodies of water. Between 2004 and 2016, it warmed more quickly than 99 percent of the global ocean, a trend scientists attribute to climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuels.  For Leathers and Oransky, there’s a connection between electrifying operations and transitioning away from the fossil fuels that have impacted their home waters. But beyond reducing environmental impact, the farmers say there’s another motivator: being a good neighbor. One feature of replacing traditional gas and diesel-powered outboards is that the electric versions are quieter. “Our boats are our workplaces,” said Leathers. “We’re out there for eight hours a day, five days a week, so reducing noise and reducing on-site emissions is a goal of not only improving the workplace but also improving our potential impact on the environment around us, whether in an ecological sense or a community sense.” Staying in the community’s good graces is essential for a business that operates year-round in close quarters with at least a dozen other farms, as well as traditional fisheries and shorefront landowners.  By the winter, Leathers and his crew expect to load between 10,000 and 15,000 oysters onto Heron each day they harvest. When the temperatures drop, they’ll no longer need containers filled with ice to keep the oysters cool. What the farmers don’t know is how the technology in their new battery-powered boat will fare in these cold, salty conditions. Part of their mission, and the DOE grant agreement, is to find out. “There’s a great proving ground here, of saying if this technology is going to develop, this is a place where it’s going to be put through its paces,” Leathers said.  A tractor for the sea A few miles down the coast, Chad Strater cruised up the Cousins River in Yarmouth, Maine on his 26-foot, all-electric workboat. He was headed to the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, a nonprofit waterfront facility he co-owns and is actively transforming into what he calls an “aquaculture innovation hub.”  Since its launch last fall, Strater has used his electric boat almost daily for the marine construction work he does with his own business, the Boat Yard, and with partner Shred Electric, a startup that replaces gas generators with batteries to power sea farm equipment. Both the Boat Yard and Shred Electric share space at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation’s Yarmouth facility. Strater’s boat has one battery-powered outboard that can haul equipment to sea farms and other marine businesses within a 15 mile radius on Casco Bay. Nick Planson, Shred Electric’s CEO and Strater’s business partner, said the two were impressed by the boat’s performance during the winter. The switch to an electric outboard was born of necessity, Strater said. When using a gas-powered boat, he’d lose fuel from idling and maneuvering the boat around work sites. Now, Strater’s success with the electric boat doubles as a model for others in the marine industry, like sea farmers, who are curious about making a switch.  Maine Ocean Farms owner Willy Leathers (left) handles what he calls “product”: three year old oysters ready for market. Fellow farmer and co-founder Eric Oransky (right) prepares to sort the mesh bag cages where the oysters grow. Julia Tilton / The Daily Yonder “You need the right tools to do the job,” said Strater. “You can’t be out there farming potatoes in a tractor from 1982 and expect to be efficient. So developing tools that make sense for efficiency, for Maine sea farmers, is what we’re doing.” In this early stage of marine electrification, aquaculture operations, or sea farms, are a logical use case, said Lia Morris, the senior community development officer at the Island Institute’s Center for Marine Economy. That’s because farmers have known variables like range, location, capacity, and schedule that tend not to change. Morris is working with Willy Leathers and Maine Ocean Farms on data collection and analysis as they compare their new boat, Heron, to a control: their existing gas-powered workboat.  “It’s almost like writing the case studies,” said Morris. “It’s putting the qualitative and quantitative data on paper and presenting the solution so that people can see how they can replicate it. That’s part of our long game in terms of outboards and commercial adoption.” Still, there are significant hurdles when it comes to scaling up electrification in Maine’s aquaculture industry. Up front, electric boats are anywhere from 20 percent to 30 percent more expensive than gas-powered ones. Once they’re in the water, charging is difficult because Maine’s sea farms are spread across a vast and mostly rural area that is largely unequipped with the charging infrastructure this transition will require.  “It’s the chicken and the egg problem,” Leathers said. “What comes first? You put a charger in and there’s nobody to use it, or you have a bunch of boats waiting to charge, but then nobody wants to invest in the boats because there’s nowhere to charge them.” Uncharted waters Like Leathers’ boat Heron, Strater’s boat was funded in part by federal and philanthropic support, including grants from some of the same institutional partners like Island Institute and Maine Technology Institute. About half of the boat’s cost, which comes in around $100,000, was financed with private investment and loans from the Coastal Enterprises Inc., a community development financial institution that helps Maine’s small businesses access lending.  Strater said the boat’s relatively low cost, about a fourth of the price tag on a boat like Leathers’ Heron, is an important part of the pilot model, since many small business owners can’t foot a several hundred thousand dollar investment up front. He and Planson have worked with the Coastal Enterprises Inc. on a marine green loan program to set up additional financing options apart from federal and philanthropic grant structures. It’s part of Planson’s philosophy to “de-risk” electrification for farmers who want to try the new technology without financial strain. “We’re working towards having all of these solutions be affordable without grant funding,” said Planson.  Chad Strater has been using his electric workboat almost daily since it launched in the fall of 2024. Julia Tilton / The Daily Yonder For now, that’s an uphill climb. In Maine, it comes at a time when marine businesses are already struggling to overcome rising costs associated with working on a rapidly developing coastline. In the early 2000s, nonprofit and government entities in Maine identified a growing risk to the state’s “working waterfront,” a term used to describe the network of access points that marine industries, including the state’s $3.2 billion seafood sector, depend on to make a living. A 2006 report commissioned by the Island Institute found that of Maine’s 3,500 miles of coastline, only 20 miles were dedicated working waterfront space.  The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association listed climate change, sea level rise, and real estate development as ongoing threats to Maine’s working waterfront in a 2020 report. Of the state’s remaining 20 miles of working waterfront, NOAA wrote that just eight miles are dedicated for public use. The remaining 12 miles are privately owned and thus vulnerable to residential or commercial development.  Rebecca Rundquist is a board member of the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, the nonprofit organization focused on protecting Maine’s working waterfront whose marina provides space for Strater and Planson’s electric boat. She said that development along the coast, and in a small town like Yarmouth, affects local food sources and the economy. She sees innovation as a way to “revitalize” communities and generate excitement around the working waterfront at a hyper-local scale. The Island Institute’s Lia Morris (left) is working with Willy Leathers (right) and his crew at Maine Ocean Farms to collect performance data on the electric boat Heron, pictured here charging from a low-capacity shoreside power supply at a slip in South Freeport, Maine. Julia Tilton / The Daily Yonder “Our message is we don’t have a one-size-fits-all. We’re here to show how you work with your community to identify the most important needs with these parcels,” said Runquist. In Yarmouth, the need revolves around aquaculture and electrification. Both Strater’s boat and Heron, the electric vessel operated by Maine Ocean Farms, will soon have access to a higher capacity level two charging station at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation along the Cousins River. Once it’s installed, the boats will be able to get a full charge in a matter of hours as opposed to the overnight shift they plug in for now. The funding for the station comes from the Island Institute and the Island Institute and the DOE grant that helped build Heron.  While it’s a start, those involved on Casco Bay recognize there’s more progress to be made on charging infrastructure, particularly as businesses up the rural parts of the coast go electric. Island Institute is preparing to release a Shoreline Charging Infrastructure report later this year detailing specific challenges around grid readiness for marine electrification in Maine. “It will be a public resource that people can read and digest and ask questions,” Morris said. “Our goal and hope is really to elevate the conversation around electrification and electric propulsion.” Finding a charge For now, Strater keeps things simple. At the end of his workday, he docked the boat along the Cousins River and headed toward a Ford charger, the same one he uses to charge his all-electric Ford Lightning truck when it’s parked at the marina. The low-capacity level two charger is mounted on a wooden post a few yards from the shore. Strater grabbed a thick charging cable to run back down toward the water, and  a light blinked green on the charger as he plugged the cable into the all-electric outboard, hovering several feet out of the water. The boat would sit there, slowly charging, for the next eight hours.  A Ford charger provides low-capacity charging to the electric outboard on Chad Strater’s boat at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation in Yarmouth, Maine. Strater can use the same charger to plug in his Ford Lightning electric truck when he’s at the marina. Julia Tilton / The Daily Yonder Usually, the down time isn’t a problem for Strater, who puts in eight-hour workdays on the boat and then leaves it overnight to charge. In the instance he does need a quick fill, he can tow the boat over land with his Ford Lightning to a Tesla fast charger off the nearby interstate. At the front edge of innovation, it’s this kind of creativity that makes Morris excited about the future of electric boat adoption in the region. “Mainers are scrappy and, you know — rural context — people figure out how to make things work,” Morris said. Reporting for this article was made possible by the Guerry Beam Memorial Reporting Grant award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Meet the small business owners electrifying Maine’s rural coast on Sep 21, 2025.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom Extends Cap-And-Trade Program Aimed at Curbing Carbon Emissions

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill extending the state's cap-and-trade program through 2045

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday extended a signature state program aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions through 2045, a move Democrats cheered but Republicans warned would raise gas prices.The program known as cap and trade sets a declining limit on total greenhouse gas emissions in the state from major polluters. Companies must reduce their emissions, buy allowances from the state or other businesses, or fund projects aimed at offsetting their pollution. Money the state receives from the sales funds climate-change mitigation, affordable housing and transportation projects, as well as utility bill credits for Californians. It was set to expire after 2030. The law Newsom signed Friday at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco potentially boosts carbon-removal projects and requires the program to align with California's target of achieving so-called carbon neutrality by 2045. That means the state will remove as many carbon emissions as it releases. The law changes the name to “cap and invest” to emphasize that the money goes toward other programs.“We’re doubling down on our best tool to combat Trump’s assaults on clean air – Cap-and-Invest – by making polluters pay for projects that support our most impacted communities,” Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement. Newsom also signed a law committing $1 billion in program revenue for the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project, $800 million for an affordable housing program, $250 million for community air protection programs and $1 billion for the Legislature to decide on annually.He approved other measures aimed at advancing the state’s energy transition and lowering costs for Californians. They include laws to speed up permitting for oil production in Kern County, refill a fund that covers the cost of wildfire damage when utility equipment sparks a blaze and allow the state’s grid operator to partner with a regional group to manage power markets in western states. Newsom also signed a bill that would increase requirements for air monitoring in areas overburdened by pollution and codify a bureau within the Justice Department created in 2018 to protect communities from environmental injustices.California has some of the highest utility and gas prices in the country. Officials face increased pressure to stabilize the cost and supply of fuel amid the planned closures of two oil refineries that make up roughly 18% of the state’s refining capacity, according to energy regulators.Environmental justice advocates said the cap-and-trade extension doesn't go far enough to address air pollution impacting low-income Californians and communities of color more likely to live near major polluters. The program's “cap” applies to planet-warming emissions, not other pollutants impacting air quality. Cap and trade doesn't set emissions limits for individual facilities, meaning an industrial polluter could continue to emit the same amount of greenhouse gases over time so long as it has the right amount of credits or offsets.Other critics of the cap-and-trade extension are worried about it raising costs. The program has increased gas costs by about 26 cents per gallon, according to a February report from the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, a group of experts that analyzes the program. It has played “a very small role” in increasing electricity prices because the state’s grid isn’t very carbon intensive, the report says.“I said it in June and I’ll say it again: legislative Democrats live in ‘Bizarro World,’" said Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland. “Their idea of tackling affordability is extending the Cap-and-Trade program, a hidden tax that drives up costs on everything from gas to groceries. That’s not climate leadership. I call it economic sabotage.”But Democratic Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, who wrote the reauthorization bill, said it will help the state fight climate change because “the cost of inaction is immeasurable.” She referenced the devastating wildfire that ripped through Pacific Palisades in her district in January.Daniel Barad, the western states acting co-director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said last week that the extension comes at a key time."The most important thing is it extends it to 2045, which was the most critical thing that the state could have done, especially in the face of federal rollbacks and attacks on California's authority to enforce our lifesaving regulations,” he said.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

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Australia Targets at Least 62% Emissions Cut in the Next Decade

Australia has set a new target of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by between 62% and 70% below 2005 levels by 2035

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australia on Thursday set a new target of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by between 62% and 70% below 2005 levels by 2035.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, leader of the center-left Labor Party, will take his government’s 2035 target to the U.N. General Assembly next week.Under the Paris climate agreement signed a decade ago, nations must increase their emissions reduction targets every five years.“This is a responsible target backed by the science, backed by a practical plan to get there and built on proven technology,” Albanese told reporters.“It’s the right target to protect our environment, to protect and advance our economy and jobs and to ensure that we act in our national interest and in the interest of this and future generations,” he added.Albanese said the target was consistent with the European Union considering for themselves a reduction target range of between 63% and 70% below 1990 levels.Matt Kean, chair of the Climate Change Authority that advises the government on climate policies, said Australia’s 2035 target demonstrated a “higher ambition than most other advanced economies.”Environmental groups had argued for a reduction target exceeding 70%.But business groups had warned cuts above 70% would risk billions of dollars in exports and send companies offshore.The conservative opposition Liberal Party, which has lost the last two federal elections, is considering abandoning its own commitment to net-zero by 2050, its only reduction target.Opposition leader Sussan Ley said the 2035 target was not credible because the government would fail to meet its 2030 target.“These targets cannot be met. They are fantasy: we know, Australians know, and they’re very disappointed in this prime minister,” Ley told reporters.The government maintains Australia is on track to narrowly achieve its 2030 target.Larissa Waters, a senator leading the environmentally-focused Australian Greens, said the government’s actual target was 62%, which she described as “appallingly low.”The government was not addressing Australia’s coal and liquefied natural gas exports, which were among the world’s largest of those fossil fuels, she said.“Labor have sold out to the coal and gas corporations with this utter failure of a climate target,” Waters told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar described the 2035 target as “ambitious.”“One of the biggest issues that industry faces at the moment is the costs that we incur in terms of energy. We’ve got to have a sustainable pathway forward. We’ve got to have energy security and we’ve got to have energy affordability as well,” McKellar said.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

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‘It’s not just our houses’: can a Scottish village save Queen Elizabeth’s coastal path from the waves?

The people of Johnshaven have watched the sea edge closer and closer. Preserving the path is key to protecting their communityPhotographs by Murdo MacLeodWhen Charis Duthie moved to Johnshaven with her husband in 1984, she could cycle along the coastal path out of the village. Now, she meets a dead end where the sea has snatched the land and is instead greeted with a big red warning sign of what is to come: Danger Coastal Erosion.“You can see gardens that were there and now they’re gone,” she says.Johnshaven, on Scotland’s North Sea coast, will attract more visitors if it has a well maintained coastal path Continue reading...

When Charis Duthie moved to Johnshaven with her husband in 1984, she could cycle along the coastal path out of the village. Now, she meets a dead end where the sea has snatched the land and is instead greeted with a big red warning sign of what is to come: Danger Coastal Erosion.“You can see gardens that were there and now they’re gone,” she says.The north-east coast of Scotland is experiencing a rapidly worsening erosion problem that will only be exacerbated by recurrent patterns of extreme weather and rising sea levels.Johnshaven, a small village with a close-knit community of 640 people about 30 miles (48km) south of Aberdeen, is particularly exposed.The village’s paths bear the scars of coastal erosion in the form of craters in the well-trodden rock, while some, such as the one Duthie points to, have disappeared altogether. The latest was taken from the village in 2023 during one of the many extreme storms that winter.Finding a solution to the problem has taken on an urgency like never before. Three years ago came the announcement of the Platinum Jubilee Path, named in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s 70 years on the throne. The aim is for it to start in St Cyrus, four miles south of Johnshaven, and end about 90 miles further north in Cullen, a village with close associations to Robert the Bruce.With the markets that have traditionally fuelled its economy – fishing and oil and gas – dwindling, Johnshaven wants to attract more visitors through the coastal path plans. The aim is to be part of Scotland’s Great Trails, which offers a map of named, walkable trails around Scotland. Currently, there is a gap in the map along the north-east coast between Aberdeen and Dundee, and Johnshaven sits in the middle of it.For Duthie, 71, helping to fill this gap is an increasingly daunting task. She is part of a small team called the Mearns Coastal Heritage Trail (Merchat) who work to restore and create coastal paths in Aberdeenshire. But as they work in one area, the sea snatches land away in another.“A lot of what we are trying to do is to prevent erosion with rock armour, which is really the only secure method,” she says.Rock armour, sometimes known as riprap, is made up of big boulders and rocks placed along the coastline to protect against the waves.To complete areas of the trail, Merchat has had to gain funding through grant applications. The food ingredients firm Macphie has donated £30,000, and a further £40,000 has come from Aberdeenshire council’s allocation of crown estate Scotland cash from the Coastal Communities Fund, money allocated by the government to help coastal communities “flourish and strengthen their appeal as places to live, work and visit”.Caspar Lampkin, project officer for the Aberdeenshire coastal paths on Benholm and Johnshaven community council, says further help from Aberdeenshire council is likely to be minimal. “They’ve told us that they don’t have the resources to do anything,” he says.“If small villages want anything like this to happen, it has got to be locally led, because we’re not going to get much help from the government or the local council.”Since April, Duthie, Lampkin and the Merchat team have been working to establish a way to apply for designated funding. “We have now started a charity called the North East Scotland Coastal Trust [Nescat] and we are paddling very fast to get the whole thing established and get going with it,” says Duthie.Meanwhile, another issue beyond access to the beautiful scenery is becoming increasingly urgent, says Lampkin. The community council has identified 100 houses in the village at risk of flooding from the sea in the coming years if no action is taken on erosion.If it’s a high tide, it’s stormy and there’s wind, those elements blow water in the houseWhile the focus of the team’s work is meant to be on restoring the paths, he says that any funding they get will probably need to be used on rock armour in areas that could protect housing along the path.Angie Dunsire, 74, walks no more than 10 steps from her doorstep before reaching the eroding coast.She has lived in Johnshaven for 32 years on the aptly named Beach Road. She says she gets a call from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency every time there is a risk of flooding.As Storm Floris approached in August, they called. “You have to be careful and listen,” she says. “We had a little bit [of water] in [the house] the other day because if it’s a high tide, it’s stormy and there’s wind, those elements blow it in.”Dunsire is scared of what the North Sea is capable of. In the distance there is a reminder. Sitting only three miles from Johnshaven is Miltonhaven – or what is left of it.It is reported by Duncan Fraser, in the book Portrait of a Parish, written in the 1970s about the parish of St Cyrus, that Miltonhaven was taken by the North Sea after Robert Scott of Dunninald arrived in the village in the 1700s.“What first drew his attention was the limestone rock that stretched in a reef across the bay, like a natural breakwater guarding the little village from the angry sea,” writes Fraser.Scott was from a family that built lime kilns to produce fertiliser for fields. From about 1750 Scott removed most of this limestone rock for his business, so the story goes, leaving the village exposed.By the 1790s, Fraser wrote, the waves had taken the “entire village”, which now lies underwater 100 yards from the shore.In an effort to right some of those so easily visible wrongs from the past, the stretch of path along Johnshaven’s Beach Road will be the first focus for rock armour with any funding the community can muster. But rock armour is expensive – about £1,000 for a small truckload – so it’s likely there won’t be much left over for path building.“People say, well it’s just your houses why go to all this expense?” says Dunsire. “Well it’s not just our houses it’s the road that goes right through the village to the park and further on.“We’re supposed to be using the coastal path and extending that. What is the point if this [the land and road along the coast] goes?”A Scottish government spokesperson says it has provided local authorities with £11.7m to support coastal change adaptation, while Aberdeenshire council says its overall budget for coast protection is £75,000 and there are no plans for any new protection works in Johnshaven. It says support and advice has been given in the setting up of Nescat and that it is not aware of any issues with the part of Beach Road that is council owned.

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