The Cost of Carbon 

Mills (2020) reminds us that the shift to cloud-based learning took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing personal energy use and occasionally surpassing energy costs of transportation. I’ve noticed a similar shift in my own school, as report cards are emailed to parents, which was enforced by the district directly. I question my district’s sustainability practices, as “personal energy use for each two hours of [digital activity] is greater than the share of fuel they would have consumed on a four-mile train ride” (Mills, 2020). What is alarming for me, is that all students begin to contribute to this cloud-based infrastructure prior to becoming a “true” emitter of CO2 via driving a car, which many understand as one of the worst contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. As students become accustomed to using cloud-based systems in schools, reliance on these systems become normalized, and students' carbon footprints grow quicker than their predecessors. As a result, the demand for ever increasing computational power grows, reinforced by cloud-based services like Office 365. This is unsustainable, as Mills (2020) points out, since the cloud infrastructure has grown from nothing to 2,000 terawatt-hours of electricity yearly, completely surpassing clean energy production in the world of all wind and solar farms combined.