Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte mhór roimh an Aire Stáit. Much attention has rightly been placed on the role of fossil fuel companies in the climate crisis, but we cannot afford to take our eye off the other big polluters, namely, the big tech companies. Big tech is exacerbating the climate crisis by driving demand for consumer goods through advertising and for electricity to run those advertisements. We often refer to Facebook and Google as tech companies but it is more accurate to describe them as the world’s two largest advertising companies. Alphabet generated almost 84% of its 2020 revenue from online advertisements, while Facebook generated more than 98.5% of its 2020 revenue in the same way. Their business models are entirely based on online surveillance advertising and targeting users, monitoring our online lives in order that they can persuade and manipulate us to buy more stuff. We will all have heard the phrase "data are the new gold".

Advertising aims to increase demand for goods and services. A 2022 report published by Purpose Disruptors found that the increase in sales driven by advertising had been responsible for 208 million tonnes of CO₂equivalent in 2022. As the co-founder of that organisation, Jonathan Wise, has stated:

The uncomfortable truth is that if you work in advertising, the better you do your job, the more damage you cause [to the planet]. This is because advertising drives consumption and consumption drives carbon emissions.

As we all know, given it has been the subject of a great deal of debate, data centres have huge electricity demands and associated emissions. We need to ask where that insatiable demand is coming from and what is happening in these data centres. One of the answers involves processing the power for immense volumes of online advertising. An insidious practice these data centres use is what is called real-time bidding, RTB. When a person lands on a web page, a complex, quick and energy-consuming auction occurs to determine what advertisement he or she will see. Real-time bidding uses data gathered on individuals, their likes and dislikes, interests, vulnerabilities and even their moods to sell their attention to the highest bidder, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties helped uncover the scale of this practice. The machinery behind this system has an enormous appetite for energy. Approximately 178 trillion real-time bidding transactions happen each year in the US and Europe alone and are processed through data centres, many of which are based in this country. It is estimated that amounts to 200 TW-hours each year, which equates to more than the entire national energy consumption of a medium-sized country happening through these real-time bidding auctions just to prey on our vulnerabilities and try to sell us products. According to a report by Global Action Plan, the technology behind this kind of online advertising, known as ad tech, is incredibly wasteful. In any one RTB auction, only one bid ultimately leads to an advertisement but trillions of unsuccessful bids surge around global data centres burning energy and heating the planet for no reason at all. In fact, 99.999% of the computer power used in these RTB auctions does not result in an advertisement and is completely wasted.

I acknowledge the Minister of State is at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, so he will just have to read out a prepared script, but it is time the tech companies were made accountable for the emissions they are producing. It is resulting in a very significant cost on our grid infrastructure, putting our energy security at risk and playing a significant role in climate change. Will the Government explore a tax on online advertising? Other countries have imposed taxes on advertising revenue, including Britain, Austria, France, Italy and Spain.