How the game industry is fighting its carbon footprint

polygon.com:

For decades now, we have been witnessing the effects of climate change in real time. According to NASA, the planet’s average surface temperature has risen around 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century. The ocean has shown warming of over 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969. The ice sheets have lost an average of 279 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2019. The global sea level has risen about eight inches in the last century.

These effects are only a small piece of the byproduct of humanity’s rapid technological and industrial development. Our constant push for advancement contributes to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, resulting in there being more CO2 in our atmosphere than at any other time in human history. In an ominous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2021, the United Nations reported, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” And a big part of that influence comes from our entertainment production, which includes nearly all aspects of the game industry, thanks to its reliance on computing, servers, manufacturing, distribution, and more.

Gaming serves as an escape from the horrors of real life, but it’s also one of the largest contributors to one of our biggest fears. That doesn’t mean that the industry isn’t working to slow its impact on climate change, though. In fact, many companies are pushing to lessen their carbon footprints.

In 2020, Sony energy policy analyst Joshua Aslan conducted a study on PlayStation 4’s European install base. In the study, Aslan factored in every PS4 that had been sold locally and estimated the energy usage. His study concluded that “if high estimates for console usage (4.4 hours per day) are