Detox. No, WhatsApp is not more polluting than all the private jets in Europe.

Where does the intox come from?

In the program “Complément d’Enquête” last week on France 2, the boss of a private aviation group wanted to give a striking example to minimize the environmental impact of his sector: “You cut WhatsApp for 2 hours worldwide, this is the equivalent of the carbon consumption of all European business aviation for one year. »

Why is this wrong?

This way of presenting things is initially misleading since it compares the pollution of an activity which concerns only a handful of people in Europe, with that generated by an application used by two billion people in the world. Then, only taking CO2 into account is also a mistake since planes release other pollutants directly into the upper atmosphere.

Above all, the figures are inconsistent. This means that the application would emit nearly 4,400 times more carbon dioxide than all private aviation in Europe. That’s more than all the emissions from global aviation. However, it is estimated that digital as a whole represents between 3 and 4% of global CO2 emissions, roughly as much as aviation in the world. A single application, which by the way is not the biggest consumer of data or infrastructure, cannot therefore represent such a share of emissions.

And that’s not all: the impact of digital in terms of CO2 is mainly linked to the manufacture of devices used to consult content, and not to data flows. “Cutting WhatsApp” as Charles Clair evokes would therefore only have a reduced impact. Unlike a flight limitation.