The Metaverse and the Climate Crisis
One of the countries most threatened by the climate caused sea rise is Tuvalu, a group of nine islands halfway between Australia and Hawaii. At present, about 40% of its capital district is submerged at high tide and the whole country has a very high probability of being totally submerged quite soon. Its 12,000 inhabitants are very aware of this reality that will soon expand to many other world areas, as the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice intensifies.
Tuvalu’s government is naturally very concerned about the situation so, in October 2022, Foreign Prime Minister Simon Kofe told the COP27 assembly that it is no longer possible to secure a future for Tuvalu in the real world! This is what Minister Kofe told the assembly:
“Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people, and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud.”
There is something quite strange in this simple sentence presented at an important climate meeting. Its strangeness is the cognitive dissonance implied in the perception of the physical world and the “cloud”. We have been led to believe that “the cloud” is not in the physical world, while the sea and land are. The cloud is as physical as everything else, it can also be destroyed by climate events and it requires chips, circuits, and energy to function, just like Tuvalu’s residents require food and shelter.
Continuing with this cognitive dissonance, Tuvalu’s government is very happy to announce that the country will be the first to become a digitized country in the Metaverse. According to Kofe:
“the creation of Tuvalu as a digital nation will allow for it to function as a state, recognized internationally with its borders and maritime boundaries and the resources within these waters”.
This sentence adds to the cognitive dissonance between reality and cloud! A presence in the Metaverse would not help to satisfy Tuvalu’s citizens’ needs in the real world–the blood and flesh people still need to eat, drink and have a roof over their heads. This means that as the sea rise progresses, they will necessarily have to become refugees. Refugee life is not easy and not many countries will be willing to accept them. Even now, Australian immigration authorities rejected a Tuvalu couple’s request for asylum due to climate change, even though the UN has formally accepted it as a valid cause.
It is also quite probable that by the time all the people of Tuvalu are forced to leave their island, the rest of the world will also experience very dire climate circumstances -increased droughts, excessive temperatures, and meteorological events. This in turn will create an increasing number of refugees looking for sustenance and a place to live, in a world in which few countries will be able to accept refugees. In these circumstances, what will Tuvalu’s rights to frontiers and maritime areas mean? Not much.
Will they be able to fish in their waters once the island is submerged while being refugees in whatever country that accepts them? In reality no, but in the Metaverse, as long as the data centers are functioning, it will be quite easy! There is already an app with a 3D experience called “fishing with dad”, in which a father in Central US and a daughter in California can have the experience of fishing together, even though they haven’t moved one inch from their living rooms.
The country of Tuvalu is the first example of the cognitive dissonance we are experiencing between the real and the virtual world. The words of Mr. Kofe imply that the cloud and the Metaverse are completely safe depositories for their country’s assets -as though the virtual world existed in a ghost-like realm in which its infrastructure wasn’t fed by energy, didn’t need raw materials, and wasn’t affected by hurricanes and floods. Even worse, Mr. Kofe completely bypasses the fact that Tuvalu’s disappearance under the sea is the result of the climate crisis directly triggered by the fast technological progress that finally led to the Metaverse.
In effect, the astounding technological progress that brought us the wonders of the internet and the disaster of the climate crisis is now trying to go beyond current technologies to connect everyone in a 3D virtual realm where people can have digital facsimiles or avatars and experience life in ‘better ways than in the physical world’.
For now, the Metaverse is very rudimentary and its best examples are video games, virtual reality headsets, and augmented reality glasses. The full version of the Metaverse, where Tuvalu will supposedly have a realistic virtual presence, will require a sharp increase in data centers and a high standard of interoperability between service-providing companies.
Just like Tuvaluans can sit on their beach and then take a swim, the Metaverse must also have the same continuity so that the user can experience a total perception of reality in the virtual world. Intel has calculated that the Metaverse will only become possible when the world has reached about 1,000 times more computing power than we have today.
If our current data centers are incredibly energy hungry, consuming the equivalent of 80,000 U.S households a year, what would a 1,000 times computing expansion consume? No one knows yet but we can calculate the gargantuan need of the Metaverse by using the closest example we currently have -the blockchain systems. The University of Cambridge has calculated that if Bitcoin were a country, it would be among the 30 most energy intensive.
This means that the Metaverse will need much more energy than the current blockchain systems, which, just like data centers, mostly rely on fossil fuels. As much as we optimistically talk about renewable energy, the truth is that it only represents about 20% of our current total global energy consumption. A jump of 80% in renewable energy, just like a huge increase in computing power, will require a great effort at increasing energy availability, manufacturing capacity, and raw material use. This will inevitably increase fossil fuel use, emissions, and ecosystem destruction.
It is very puzzling that the same institutions and corporations that repeatedly advocate for climate action are the same that propose the Metaverse and universal digital currencies. Tech companies involved in the development of the Metaverse like Google, Amazon, and Meta are always parading their carbon neutrality and complete shift to renewable energy for an ever-delayed date. Google, for example, has been proclaiming its carbon-neutral credentials since 2007. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, said in a blog post:
“Google’s lifetime net carbon footprint is now zero and we’re pleased to be the first major company to get this done, today.”
This pronouncement, though said in the real world, is such a fantasy that it belongs instead in the Metaverse. Google is so avid for its ‘green’ label that its CEO dares to say that its actions are erasing not just its current emissions, but also all its past emissions! The essence of this magic trick is to claim carbon offsets by paying for supposedly green projects elsewhere. This carbon offsetting is often done by planting tree monocultures that will soon be cut to make paper towels, or exchanging emissions with historically low-emission countries. Another creative math project, the pride of Google’s carbon neutrality strategy, is capturing methane gas emitted from pig farms and landfill sites.
It is quite ‘commendable’ that a company like Google has accepted that methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas, but its methane-removing strategies appear to work only in the virtual world of the Metaverse. Google focuses on carefully selected methane emissions while ignoring the much larger emissions from swamps, fossil fuel extraction, and permafrost melting. All of these promises have no accountability –if all their strategies worked, the measurements of the global greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere would have shown a corresponding reduction -but instead- they continue rising!
Climate action that relies only on rhetoric but not on reality will increase the degradation of the Earth’s systems which will in turn cause a faster disappearance of Tuvalu and many low-lying areas around the world. It will also unleash an increasingly capricious climate in which nothing is safe -including the Metaverse!
In the climate disaster conundrum we are in, the information about Tuvalu in the Metaverse is as vulnerable to climate events as much as Tuvalu, the only difference is that it is easier to predict the disappearance of the island than the generalized demise of data centers that hold Tuvalu’s information in the ‘cloud’.
