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Data Storage Earth AI Cloud

Do Emails Contribute to Global Warming? (japantimes.co.jp) 169

"Cut back on email if you want to fight global warming," read the headline on a recent article at Bloomberg:
[A]ll those messages require energy to preserve them. And despite the tech industry's focus on renewables, the advents of streaming and artificial intelligence are only accelerating the amount of fossil fuels burned to keep data servers up. Right now, data centers consume about 2 percent of the world's electricity, but that is expected to reach 8 percent by 2030. Moreover, only about 6 percent of all data ever created is in active use today, according to research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means 94 percent is sitting in a vast "landfill" with a massive carbon footprint.

"It's costing us the equivalent of maintaining the airline industry for data we don't even use," said Andrew Choi, a senior research analyst at Parnassus Investments, a $27 billion environmental, social and governance firm in San Francisco. Kirk Bresniker, chief architect of Hewlett Packard Labs, said these server farms use energy both to retain your data and when you use it... And when you empty the email trash, you probably aren't actually erasing the data. Multiple copies of even decade-old emails are stored on servers around the world, still using energy...

Bresniker says the tech industry is "flying blind" when it comes to the true cost of storing data. The picture is clouded by a constant stream of efficiency and memory upgrades, increased renewable power and AI aimed at data-center efficiency. "We don't really understand what the footprint is," he said... The sum of all the world's data in 2018 was 33 zettabytes — 33 trillion gigabytes — but by 2025 it could increase fivefold, to 175 zettabytes, according to International Data Corp. Every day, the world produces about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data... Computing workloads are likely to more than double as more AI comes online, more devices are connected and people do more work in the cloud...

Choi says the problem is getting too big, too fast... Training an AI model emits about as much carbon as the lifetime emissions associated with running five cars.

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Do Emails Contribute to Global Warming?

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @07:36AM (#59659948)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:20AM (#59660036) Homepage Journal

      Data centre energy consumption is an issue, it's just that the people in the article have no real clue and the journalist seems to have decided that "email" is the most relateable way to explain our data storage needs.

      It's an issue we need to look at but this article is so far off base it's distracting.

      • Re: Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:52AM (#59660102)

        That was my rant on her website. Every day more energy is used mining cryptocurrency than a third world country uses in an entire year. Yet she goes after EMAIL. Not facebook live, not youtube live, not social media, but email. Because 1 email consumes more resources than yet another minecraft youtuber video? I ended up telling her to pull her head out of her ass, do some damned research for once, and stop taking the short bus to/from work.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I've been meaning to do an analysis of the profitability of installing solar or even a wind turbine vs. the profitability of mining equipment.

      • The alternative is to print and store everything on paper. Remember when large companies had entire buildings and people with heating and cooling and lights and fire suppression and forklifts dedicated to filing paper and assorted company stuff. I remember because people used to store backup tapes there as the buildings became full and the company became digitized.

      • If you locate the data center someplace where people would otherwise be burning energy to generate heat, then it's essentially free. Thermodynamically, computers are nothing more than fancy electric heaters. So the heat generated by the computers in your data center directly reduces the amount of heating you need from other sources by the same amount.
    • by syn3rg ( 530741 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:30AM (#59660054) Homepage
      If only there were a plant-based alternative to email....
    • >"Another day, another pile of guilt-peddling bullshit."

      Indeed. Perhaps we should mail paper letters, instead. Or just stop communicating completely.

      One who worries about this kind of crap should maybe just commit suicide? I am sure that would save all kinds of impact on the planet and end their "torment", and, as a bonus, we don't have to listen to it anymore.

    • Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <stonent AT stone ... intclark DOT net> on Monday January 27, 2020 @09:13AM (#59660170) Journal
      Do posting dumb stories causing thousands of people to click on them contribute to global warming? ;)
    • Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27, 2020 @09:43AM (#59660252)

      In the early 2000s a report was published that was critical of the George W. Bush administration for not doing enough on climate change. And, it predicted that by 2020 coastal cities in the U.S. would be under water due to rising sea levels.

      Well, it's now 2020 and maybe you haven't noticed but nobody is under water. That doesn't prove climate change doesn't exist and it doesn't prove that we don't have a problem. But it does prove that climate alarmism is one of the biggest problems we have.

      Climate alarmism makes the anti-climate nutjobs even more sure that they are right, and makes them fight even harder against any meaningful actions with regard to climate. Idiots like Greta Thunberg, pushing climate alarmism, have done enormous harm.

      • I don't know what report you are talking about, but the problem of flooding caused climate change isn't the day to day sea level, but flood damage during major storms gets much more serious and wide spread for every slight increase in base sea level, not to mention major storms are more frequent and severe. There have been major flooding events in US coastal cities since the report came out, including significant damage to New York City.

    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      If you're not a religious environmentalist, your emails are not a sin. You can tell them they are welcome to their religion, but to leave you out of it.

      If you want, you can do practical things to conserve. You don't need moralizing zealots wagging fingers at everything you do every day.

      Also, you know these people are probably planning to fly off for a fun ski vacation in a couple weeks, right?

      • If you're not a religious environmentalist, your emails are not a sin. You can tell them they are welcome to their religion, but to leave you out of it.

        If you want, you can do practical things to conserve. You don't need moralizing zealots wagging fingers at everything you do every day.

        Also, you know these people are probably planning to fly off for a fun ski vacation in a couple weeks, right?

        The issue to me is that people should not be prevented from flying off for a nice vacation whether they believe in the energy retention of the atmosphere based on it's composition or not. Even the most god fearing patriotic coal roller's emissions are pretty small on a per capita basis.

        What happens is there be one shitload of them percapita's out there.

        Too many people, despite what a lot of Slashdotters believe.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • And this time, the idea is laughable. It takes precisely zero energy to STORE an e-mail. It takes energy to read or write an e-mail, but not to store it. Somebody has no idea how the technology they use every day works.

    • When something like half of all e-mail transmitted around the Internet is spam, that seems like a better starting point. Also bloated, inefficient e-mail clients like Outlook. Fix those two, and the problem basically goes away.
    • by MrData ( 130916 )
      What do all of these "global warming" types have against plants anyway, especially since they are all vegans ?
  • Load of BS (Score:4, Informative)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @07:49AM (#59659962)

    I guess breathing contributes more to Global Warming that e-mail.

    • A gallon of gas holds roughly 30000 kcalories or 36kWh, which is roughly 10 days of food intake of an average adult, so the maximum bound on the heat contributed by what a person breathes out is around 36.5 gallons of gasoline per year. Five cars on the other hand will go through 2700 gallons of gas in that timeframe, enough for 11kW of continuous electricity draw, which seems a lot for the claims made. The human on the other hand is equivalent to 150W continuous power draw, which is more in the ballpark yo

      • I realise what you are saying and the claim at the end of the summary are not comparable, so my comparison above doesn't really make much sense. But I think the 150W figure for a human is probably higher than a single persons usage for email, maybe close to the average for their total internet usage.

        The claim in the other article though definitely doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Let's say the cars lifetime is 15 years, the gasoline intake for 5 cars over that time is equivalent to 1.5GWh, I don't know what so

    • To save energy I hold my breath and print out every email. I figure using all of that paper and toner helps to sequester even more carbon.

  • by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @07:57AM (#59659974) Homepage Journal

    Things that contribute far more to global warming than e-mail:

    • Any of those Chromium-based applications that waste a ton of memory and CPU to do simple things (Discord, recent versions of Skype, Visual Studio Code, etc.)
    • Streaming music to listen to it rather than keeping it locally (Spotify, etc.), or even worse, streaming videos to listen to music (YouTube, etc.).
    • Live webcam "models" (LiveJasmin, StripChat, Chaturbate, etc.).
    • Driving to run errands within walking distance.
    • What I find amazing is that eclipse is SLOWER and more resource intensive than Visual Studio Code. I prefer normal Visual Studio to Visual Studio Code because I find it is faster and uses less resources while offers more features.

    • by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @09:06AM (#59660150)

      And the biggest of all..

      Cryptocurrency mining. More energy consumed mining various crypto than a 3rd world country consumes in an entire year. Like all the resources on the planet spent storing mail is still far less than spent other forms of communication. The long term power requirements of inactive files is way less than the power requirements of delivering active files or crunching numbers.

      Globally how much power is consumed every day rendering Overwatch or Fortnite, not just at the data center but all the routers, switches, optical transceivers, and local consoles.

      Storing idle files is the least consuming thing in the digital world. Every couple of years the density takes a new turn in efficiency. 4TB solid state storage drives operating on NVMe bus speeds. What power requirements did 4TB consume 15yr ago using Ulta160 SCSI and countless raid arrays??

      This planet needs to start making everyone take engineering courses. I dont mean they need to work as an engineer, but at least have some background in how to think like one. the stupidity of people with an audience is starting to prompt a rather darwinian type of response.

      • This planet needs to start making everyone take engineering courses. I dont mean they need to work as an engineer, but at least have some background in how to think like one.

        Whoa there Tex! Not saying your wrong, but baby steps. We need to get people to be able to think critically and be able to work on a common set of facts before we can build up to that.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      I bet java does a LOT too.
      After all more than a billion of devices run it instead of something more efficient.

  • by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @07:58AM (#59659980) Homepage Journal

    surely not or my computer would have melted already. that's quite a generalization considering some models, majority of them in fact due to statistics, are trained in a few hours on desktop pc's.

    and email doesn't use jack shits worth energy. remember last year that ridiculous thing about how streaming netflix every day for a week takes as much as energy as flying in airplane to a holiday destination? total utter lies... they don't even want the stories to make any sense anymore - all they care about is to get to write an alarmist piece that tries to moralize people to sit in a closet with eys closed and with the lights off because they'll die of global warming and little children in africa will die if they have a shower...

    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      Choi was likely referring to this [technologyreview.com] research which shows the carbon footprint of various AI model training scenarios. Of course he is only referring to the most ridiculously expensive scenario presented.

      Most of the training scenarios used a couple hundred pounds of CO2 equivalent energy, which is less than 0.2% of an average car's lifetime carbon footprint. Using their estimates, it would take about half a million dollars of AWS training to reach the carbon footprint of a car's lifetime usage. The one example

  • by Cesare Ferrari ( 667973 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:00AM (#59659986) Homepage

    to be carbon negative.

    https://blogs.microsoft.com/bl... [microsoft.com]

    It's ironic that a company that I grew up thinking as boring and unimaginative turns out to be thinking and publishing stuff like this. How successful they will be at their effort is of course still uncertain, but you have to commend the vision.

  • All the data centers that use "clean" energy like solar, wind power or hydro?

    And it's not like all that electricity is saved somewhere if it's not used.

  • by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:06AM (#59660000)

    Yes, email requires energy to move whatever information contained in same around the world.

    Of course, snail mail requires even more energy to move whatever information in same around the world. After all, USPS trucks aren't zero energy devices, nor are the airplanes or ships required to move mail overseas....

    So, if we cut back on email, we will inevitably increase the energy required to move information around the world.

    If you want people to take AGW as a serious threat, then peddling nonsense like this is NOT the way to go about it....

  • Alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:06AM (#59660002) Journal
    Consider instead how much energy the use of email has saved. Thanks to email and other forms of electronic communication, snail mail is all but dead in this country; it's mostly delivery of packages these days.
    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      Not only that, they note that most "data" is not regularly accessed, and jump immediately to blaming email for that. I bet email is a single-digit percentage of all data storage, so deleting every email after reading it would probably not change the overall "problematic" numbers much.

      I also wonder what the author's local librarians think about throwing out data that isn't accessed "often" by some standard.

      • Wanna bet that tracking everything everyone does is starting to be noticeable on their electricity bill?
      • Ide files consume vastly less energy than rendering or processing algorithms. They consume less energy than streaming data from an active file. They just require storage which exponentially gets more dense and less power hungry every couple years.

        Design a 4TB solution using 2005 technology and compare power consumption to a 4TB nvme ssd drive of todays tech, including the energy to cool said storage.

        • A better analogy would be to design a 2005 4GB solution (more realistic) to match today's 4TB solution.

          And that proves your point more and more, 1000x storage for measurably less power consumption.

          This is indeed one of the more BS climate shaming stories in a long time.

          • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

            well i remember doing raid-5 with a hot spare on ultra160 controllers using drive enclosures in a rack. The drives were 120gig each and were 1.5in drive height 10,000 rpm drives. You had a max of 15 devices (including the controller) on the chain. So 14 drives per raid channel doing raid-5 with a hot spar but the chassis would really only hold about 10-12 drives if I remember correctly. But lets assume theoretical max of 14 drives in the chassis. Raid 5 turns 1 drive into parity and the hot spare would cons

    • Consider instead how much energy the use of email has saved. Thanks to email and other forms of electronic communication, snail mail is all but dead in this country; it's mostly delivery of packages these days.

      The fallacy of the false alternative indeed.

    • It's mostly spam these days. I don't get a package every day but I do get postal spam every day.

  • And the trillions of messages from Amazon "Got your order", "Will ship soon", "Just shipped" and so on.

  • The idea that streaming 30 minutes of video results in 1.6 kg of CO2 emissions was recently debunked*, and now we have this, in the absence of properly sourced numbers in context, steaming pile.

    *: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programm... [bbc.co.uk] (spoiler: better estimate is 20g)

    • Streaming 30 minutes of video burns more energy than all the text emails a person could read in a lifetime. It’s a very small amount.
  • Ok doomer (Score:5, Funny)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:44AM (#59660088) Journal

    Yeah that pretty much says it.
    I really wish I'd thought of it.

  • Who knew that PHBs would be the cause of global warming, eh?

    I only keep emails forever and a day because at some time in the future, the PHBs will say "show me the email" when I state that X person said they would or wouldn't do Y by Z time. This is usually necessary because the PHB in question has the attention span of a gnat and the memory of a goldfish.

    If we didn't have to prove pointless things the whole time, I wouldn't keep much email at all.

    As for pointless stuff we don't use... slashdot may use gree

  • First off, if you care about wasting electric so much, why not start with a list of the industries using the most electric? Than prioritize them by how easy/cheap they are to improve. Computers and datacenters are well aware that lower power is the way to go. I don't think you will make big gains in efficient on an emerging and already automated digital industry. At least not the big gains you can make by targeting all those ancient legacy systems. Why make the headline about email? Sure there is a lot of
  • Even if we were to agree that email storage contributes a significant percentage of data center power usage compared to all of the other things that data centers do and store (and it's not -- you need to start with processing and then cooling -- not storage -- for where almost all of data center power usage goes anyway) -- I'm guessing most of these stored and archived emails are spam or old junk / advertisements / newsletters anyway. It's likely that searching for various spam keywords over the decades -

    • I keep email of stuff I want to recall. The reset I empty from the trash regularly. Since I've transitioned from my personal mail server I reduce my cloud storage enough to save an island somewhere, but my personal server i clean up enough to save Liverpool, perhaps.

      Sadly, our planet is doomed by my email archives, going back to 1993, before that all the systems have been shut down and gone. And I've probably caused more trouble with the various formats, MBOX, PST/OST, text, something I'm going to have to

  • The streaming video ad on that article's webpage consumed more bandwidth than my email today will. And sure, Netflix may use some energy, but compared to Blockbuster's hayday I'd bet it is less than shipping around lots of physical goods and people driving to the rental store.
  • 2.4 quintillion bytes of which is shitty Microsoft formatting in HTML emails to say "OK, will do".

  • They sure contain a lot of hot air.

  • Blaming emails is a bit like a guy in a huge 4*4 berating a kid on a moped for harming the environment. I spend much longer on Slashdot than reading/writing emails and I'm sure that Facebook, Twitter, etc use more than all the email servers do.
  • (Somewhat relevant: What's the effect if one of an entangled particle pair is sent to a black hole?)

  • Essentially ALL HUMAN ACTIVITY contributes to global warming. Heck even if you some how managed to only use energy for solar/wind to power the manufacturing process to create additional solar wind plant, the act of mining the materials to do so would still release a significant amount of carbon and compound that by further reducing forested land.

    When Microsoft says something like we are going to be carbon negative in 10 years, its bs marketing. Either they are going to do it by not actually reducing emiss

  • I took a look with the Firefox web developer console and on my system firefox loaded 4.14MB of data to read the article (1.93MB uncached). Google claims the average email size is 75K. So figure that clicking on the article is very roughly as bad for the environment as sending anywhere from 26 to 57 average sized emails.

  • by julian67 ( 1022593 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @09:53AM (#59660282)

    Do what I do and simply print out all my emails and store them in filing cabinets. Every 5 years I burn the stuff I don't need any more.

  • Nah, just requires energy to crack any encrypted content and power the heuristics automatically sifting through 100% of transmitted emails looking for keywords so the government can get more taxes out of people or assist corporate overlords in cutting down competition before it crops up.
  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @10:09AM (#59660322)
    Those lowlifes account for the vast majority of email traffic. We now know that they are even more obnoxious than we thought.
    • Nope - blame two American politicians. Sarbanes and Oxley.

      The Sarbanes-Oxley act pretty much obliges large businesses to keep every single e-mail/message/video chat just in case it's needed in the American courts. Even businesses with no activities in the USA are stuck with it if they are quoted on an american stock exchange. So our IT department has to keep terabytes of useless trash online and searchable just in case it's needed for S-O compliance.

  • If you care about your email footprint, then use an email client that sends text (ASCII), instead of base64_encoded quoted-printable HTML-rendered Word docs.

    If you really care, then also delete the hundreds of lines of accumulated Re: Re: Re: Re: ... text from the message when all you have to say is "OK".

    And if we (globally) care, maybe we could prevail upon the transfer agents to lose those wads of useless X- headers that bulk up the messages.

  • I'm so surprised people are so upset. I want to see more articles like this. Spam is a mild nuisance to me and I've managed to learn to ignore it, but it is costly!

    All those stupid and shitty things big tech companies do have a lot of costs which people are thinking about....a phone or laptop with no removable battery?...ends up in a landfill leeching toxins....had the battery been replaceable at a reasonable cost, it would be in use for another 3 years either by the original owner or someone buying it used.

    A site with obnoxious ads, lowers your battery life by draining a ton of resources to render full video in various plugins and lots of JavaScript.

    Now spam....

    I was given a gift card from Williams Sonoma in an office white elephant gift exchange. I buy 1 thing from them online and they proceed to e-mail me every day from every child company owned by their parent....a bunch of places I would NEVER shop. I had to unsubscribe about 8x from one order. I never consented to being spammed in the first place. The same with Home Depot...I place one order, get daily e-mails about nonsense that has nothing to do with my interests. I'd like to be notified about sales, sure...but don't need daily e-mails advertising light fixtures (when all I ordered was a drill). I've unsubscribed to several reputable retailers and still get occasional e-mails (not nearly as often as before).

    ...and these are reputable top retailers....shitty ones are far worse.

    ...but it doesn't just end at the cost of me seeing their e-mail and deleting it.

    G-mails default is archive, so if you're using gestures, you're archiving the e-mail, consenting for them to store it as long as they see fit...plus do you REALLY believe that google actually deletes your e-mail? Google, Facebook, and every other advertising company masquerading as a service has no interest in honoring your wishes...they'd rather build a large dataset on you...so all this spam is being retained by them (either legally if you archive or unethically if you delete, but they keep a copy on their server)...for who knows how long.

    What irks me is they view one order as a route for endless free (not counting energy costs) advertising. I don't mind ads in web pages because it pays for content I enjoy. The retailer is paying for something I like in exchange for the potential to get my attention. When they spam me, they get that for free. They create a trivial amount of work for me and we get nothing in return. I HATE free advertising. I understand that I need to view ads to pay for TV and other "free" content, but it really raises my blood pressure when theaters charge me admission and make me watch coke and car dealer ads. I never buy clothes with advertisements (giant GAP logo on chest, for example). If I have to see ads, I want something in return. Otherwise, it's just a public nuisance and should be dealt with as such.

    Yes, I understand that this is a very small amount of electricity compared to cryptocurrency and youtube and porn sites and whomever consumes the most energy, but I think we can all agree that no one wants spam.

    Some actual regulations and real penalties for breaking existing laws would make some tangible good for consumers in a way that makes their life easier and they lose nothing in return. This is an easy win. Crack down on spammers...regulate the data e-mail hosts, like Google, can retain....less nuisance for the rest of us...less energy consumed for no good reason. Seems like everyone wins.
  • his useless post contributes to global warming.
    it's hosted on a server, just like emails, and in a week, nobody will read this post again, but it will remain stored and available on the site forever.
    even if they delete it later on, it will be part of some backups/archives.
    the author is his own enemy!

  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @11:11AM (#59660562) Homepage Journal

    The right question is, do they contribute more to global warming than the alternative.

    Policy questions *always* need to be phrased in terms of what the best/least bad *alternative* is. About twenty-five years ago Greenpeace started an initiative to ban chlorine in industrial processes. At the time I worked for a different environmental organization, and we opposed that initiative.

    It's not that chlorine emissions aren't bad for the environment, they're *really* bad. Our problem was this: what harm would the replacements do to the environment? Chlorine is used in most cases because of its power to cleave chemical bonds -- for example in bleaching. If you banned chlorine compounds, industrial users would switch to alternatives that do exactly the same things. These would likely have similar environmental effects, or possibly worse.

    Supposing that you *can* cut down on emails, what would you replace it with? Paper mail?
    If email's carbon footprint is something we should be worried about, we should be looking at ways to cut down on junk email. These are clearly a net cost to society, but the emails you actually *want* accomplish things you'd do by some other means if you didn't have email. Email is very likely the lowest carbon footprint way to do those things.

  • I like to be environmentally conscious and not waste all that power to store my e-mails. That's why I like to print out each and every e-mail twice, and save the copies at different temperature and climate controlled storage facilities. No more wasted power storing bits for me!
  • Time to take Google out behind the shed....
  • by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @11:51AM (#59660762) Homepage

    Ad networks waste more energy than anything else in computing. Ad networks consume vast amounts of energy running in the most inefficient way possible.

  • "Cut back on email if you want to fight global warming,"

    then

    Training an AI model emits about as much carbon as the lifetime emissions associated with running five cars.

    ... because AI for emails is a thing.

    Moreover, only about 6 percent of all data ever created is in active use today, according to research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means 94 percent is sitting in a vast "landfill" with a massive carbon footprint.

    then

    Bresniker says the tech industry is "flying blind" when it comes to the true cost of storing data. ... We don't really understand what the footprint is

    We don't understand what the footprint is, but it's "vast" and "massive". Not only do we not understand the cost per datum, we don't even understand what that datum is. Maybe all of it is email.

    At least we get our dose of Monday morning humor.

  • Someone should send an email to her so she can check how much energy she wasted by writing this article.
  • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Monday January 27, 2020 @01:32PM (#59661244)
    Considering all my old emails are stored for the cost of free, and all my email is delivered and received for the cost of free - they can't be using THAT much electricity, otherwise why would mail providers and servers eat the loss themselves? It just doesn't make sense. Oh wait, could it be that those data centers aren't just storing email, they're also doing OTHER things? Doesn't that affect the calculations a bit? Once again the green guilt trippers don't know how to count, or they intentionally mislead.
  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday January 27, 2020 @01:44PM (#59661310) Journal
    If nosy, anal-retentive, power-grubbing 'law enforcement' (SWSOT) types and government agencies would stop requiring all email services and ISPs to retain your emails for so long then how much less data storage would be necessary, therefore how much energy savings?

    For that matter, while I'm on the subject: how much does all the stupid surveillance tech in the world contribute to the carbon footprint of humanity overall? All so a relatively small group of snooping anal-retentive types can stop doing the pee-pee dance out of anxiety over not being able to stick their noses in everyones' business at will, even though all the cameras, microphones, and other snooping on people everywhere 24/7 hasn't improved actual law enforcement any measureable amount enough to justify invading everyones' privacy, and meanwhile actual virulent criminal activity thrives unabated.

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