Clive Humby is credited with coining the phrase “Data is the new oil”. A mathematician by training and the marketing brain behind Tesco’s Clubcard, he observed in 2006 that “like oil, data is valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.”
Now environmental scientists are beginning to worry that data resembles oil in its harmful effects on climate as well — not data per se, but servers, data farms and other hardware required for creating, storing and processing data for the increasingly digital life.
The world has been steadily getting interconnected and digitalised since the world-wide-web came into being.
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