How High-Speed Broadband Can Fight Climate Change

There are a lot of reasons why we should build out high-speed broadband infrastructure, like how it can offer low-cost, easy access to education, communication and business services. But one of the most important reasons going forward will be the Internet's ability to replace physical goods with virtual ones and fight global warming. This month, we've seen a wave of research that shows how digital goods (like music and books downloads) are superior from an energy and CO2 perspective vs. their physical counterparts. As Bill St. Arnaud put it on his blog recently: "The next killer app for the Internet is dematerialization." In other words, the Internet will be one of the key tools to fighting climate change by replacing atoms with digital bits, reducing physical goods created, and cutting carbon emissions.