In case you hadn’t noticed, we are in something of a crisis, climate-wise. I’ll spare you the details, but the human race does seem to be racing headlong towards a self-made extinction that seems a little unnecessary.

But at least you’re not making it that much worse, are you? After all, you just make ads. That’s not exactly running a power station or building an oil rig, is it? True, but you may be using a lot more unnecessary energy than you think.

Let’s start at the beginning: the concepting stage. Google searches aren’t too bad, but you’ve probably moved on to ChatGPT now, and those interactions, which scrape their information from much more of the internet, consume 25 times more energy. Beyond that, 20-50 ChatGPT enquiries also require a litre of valuable water to cool its servers.