How to Save the Planets and your Grades with Eco-Friendly Browsers

By Shriyaa Madan Gopal

All of last year, I couldn’t help but look around in class and notice all the ChatGPT, Copilot, perplexity AI, and more AI chatbots sitting as open tabs and pinned sites on nearly all of my classmates' computers. I’m sure everyone, including frequent AI users have heard the same phrase of “AI is ruining the planet” over and over, and as a proud repeater of this phrase, unfortunately, as frustrated as this makes me, I know this will probably never work in getting people to stop relying on these chatbots.

Now, if you’re one of those people who, after reading/hearing that phrase for what is probably the 200th time, and still choose to ignore that fact, your response would probably be “how does that even work?’ Well, when you enter a prompt on an AI site like chatGPT it goes through hundreds, if not thousands, of calculations to generate the best version of what you’re asking for. Whether it be a couple of English questions you weren’t bothered to do, or a couple of English essays you forgot. These calculations don’t just come spewing magically out of your computer; they come from physical data centers. Just like your laptops when you have too many tabs open, these data center servers heat up, and to prevent them from overheating, they need water, and with millions of people sending in their prompts from every corner of the world, they need A LOT. The water transports the heat generated by these centers into cooling towers to help escape the building, leading to excessive loss of water. Meaning all your homework that you “forgot to do” until the last minute will eventually lead to less water for the rest of us.

If that hasn’t convinced you to switch to the clearly superior browsers I am about to recommend, let me tell you about the reliability of AI, specifically the reliability of the Google AI overview that people love to get all their information from. (spoiler alert: there is little to none.); AI overview does not take its information from reputable sources. For example, within overviews related to health, the most cited source was YouTube, and the next was a public broadcaster; about around 34% of links came from reliable medical sources. 

So, for the new school year, if you are looking for more reliable browsers for future research and a way to save the environment at the same time, let me recommend to you my personal favourite suggestions with links! 

1. Ocean Hero: https://oceanhero.today/

When users search with Ocean Hero, they display results with a few related ads, the revenue from these ads pays for collecting ocean-bound plastic, and every five searches in this browser helps recover one plastic bottle. Imagine how many bottles you’ll recover using this for a whole year!

2. Ecosia: Ecosia.

 Ecosia uses clean energy, and 100% of its profits go towards tree-planting projects all around the world. They are a very transparent company. Plus, if it's hard for you to go completely without AI, they have a search tool from more reliable sources, which uses less energy, but please try to avoid using it and just use the regular search!!

3. Ekoru: https://ekoru.org

When you search on Ekoru, you collect items by opening tabs and searching the web, and each time you collect items, you will be able to recover one bottle from the ocean, plant more seagrass, and save CO2. This might be a bit tricky to use on your laptop as you have to download it, but please consider using this for your phone!

To help save the planet, it’s as simple as pinning one of these sites to your laptop’s default browser (usually Google) and instead of clicking on a new tab, just enter a search in any site you prefer. I know it may be a hard habit to break, but I’m sure your love for the planet can outweigh it! People whom I’ve spoken to on the environmental impacts of AI say they’ll just continue using it as one person won’t make a difference, but if everyone thinks that way, our planet will never heal. Please do your part and make a difference!