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.
[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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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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.
Re: Oh, fuck off. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes they actually have. It is vital to know how much power you are consuming versus how much money you are making. Otherwise youâ(TM)re just pissing money down the toilet. Running 700 W of power 24 x 7 is a measurable consumption. Surely you are not suggesting that nearly storing a terabyte of storage on my hard drive consumes more power than running 700 W of power nonstop.
Re: Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Insightful)
The University of Cambridge has developed a tool for this https://www.cbeci.org/ [cbeci.org]
That might have gone past you unnoticed but these things are measured.
Just like the other comment stated, power consumption is an essential part in the cost-benefit analysis that miners do. So at least that part can be accounted for with decent accuracy.
Of course not all cryptocurrency has work on this proof-of-work concept, where mining is a thing. There's also mechanism like proof-of-stake which do not have that power hungry and electronics devastating mining process.
The cost of running services like cryptocurrencies are a valid concern. And while eMails are arguably a stupid example people should not be using this for 'picking a nut' in order to discredit the case people make with power consumption of all these different services under the rug.
Re: Oh, fuck off. (Score:3)
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.
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Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, you even could go so far to use a Dove to deliver it ...
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>"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:2)
Yep. Or use facebook live. Im sure video uses much less resources than html encoded ascii.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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That's not true. It's trivial to find examples of seasonal flooding worsening to the point that it's perpetual. Learn to internet, kid.
Miami is calling on line 2. They want their 1980s coastline back.
Re:Oh, fuck off. (Score:4, Insightful)
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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?
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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.
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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.
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How about "Yes, I know it does, just like this website and your post does.", and THEN "Fuck off"?
Re:Grow up (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't you say, "No, I don't think that it does." without taking personal offense at the article? What a delicate snowflake you are.
And yet it takes the comprehension of a child to dispel the entire argument and validate the parents statement. You want to solve global warming via email? Then understand that 90%+ of the email energy problem stems from fucking spam. And that problem certainly isn't caused by the end user, nor will it be fixed by peddling guilt-riddled bullshit.
Grow up.
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Why can't you say, "No, I don't think that it does." without taking personal offense at the article? What a delicate snowflake you are.
And yet it takes the comprehension of a child to dispel the entire argument and validate the parents statement. You want to solve global warming via email? Then understand that 90%+ of the email energy problem stems from fucking spam. And that problem certainly isn't caused by the end user, nor will it be fixed by peddling guilt-riddled bullshit.
Grow up.
Differential analysis humans send spam and email and release sequestered carbon. We should get rid of 90 percent of humans.
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Why can't you say, "No, I don't think that it does." without taking personal offense at the article? What a delicate snowflake you are.
And yet it takes the comprehension of a child to dispel the entire argument and validate the parents statement. You want to solve global warming via email? Then understand that 90%+ of the email energy problem stems from fucking spam. And that problem certainly isn't caused by the end user, nor will it be fixed by peddling guilt-riddled bullshit.
Grow up.
Differential analysis humans send spam and email and release sequestered carbon. We should get rid of 90 percent of humans.
Uh, humans send spam? Tell me, do you often mistake spambots for your neighbor, or are you just that ignorant about how spam is perpetuated? If you're gonna analyze, at least do it fucking accurately.
So these spambots have no human in the loop? Who did this? Aliens? Small weasels? Martha Stewart?
Dayum, my cowardly friend, must be a slow day for you to find the need to reply to that throwaway email - incorrectly,BTW. Humans created spam, Humans created the spambots. That is all.
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Correct. Most spambots have no humans in the loop. They did at one point, but that one point was long ago. Spambots are basically von Neuman machines spread with virus technology.
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No. Just no. Spambots are not autonomous in any meaningful way. They get their marketing content from humans, who control what the spambots are up to at any given moment through command and control servers (or similar mechanisms).
The only thing they do autonomously is replicate.
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But they do not necessarily need NEW advertising content. In fact, they do just fine with the original content created at the time of launch.
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But they do not necessarily need NEW advertising content. In fact, they do just fine with the original content created at the time of launch.
Is your argumenrt that spambots are now living entities?
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Correct. Most spambots have no humans in the loop. They did at one point, but that one point was long ago. Spambots are basically von Neuman machines spread with virus technology.
One of my prime arguments is the idea that email is a contributer to AGW is undenialbly ridiculous except to thois of a puritanical mental streak that requires them to tidy up their own little corner of the world while the rest of it burns.
Unless spambots arose like Venus from the sea, fully formed with no creator - yes yes indeed, there was and is a human in the loop.
Yes - it is ridiculous. But no more ridiculous than any of the other idiotic minutae arguments we've been having.
Because if we are
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Spam seems to be slowly dying, probably due to spam filters being pretty effective now.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
I bet corporate email needs a lot more storage than spam though. Aside from the fact that spam is quickly deleted it's the corporate emails full of images and giant attachments that eat up space.
People were hitting the 2GB mailbox limit in Outlook in the early 2000s.
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I check my spam and junk folders once a week...
That Somalian Prince is STILL sending out millions!
Re:Grow up (Score:5, Insightful)
Then understand that 90%+ of the email energy problem stems from fucking spam.
A lifetime of emails probably amounts to like five minute of YouTube, it doesn't have an energy problem. The problem is the manhours wasted on junk mail and the important stuff people miss out on because it got lost in the junk mail.
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Because ignorance is extremely offensive.
Re: Grow up (Score:2)
One thing's for sure, the carbon emissions from making his underwear have to stop. A family of immigrants can use his underwear as a tent.
Re: Grow up (Score:2, Insightful)
Load of BS (Score:4, Informative)
I guess breathing contributes more to Global Warming that e-mail.
Re: Load of BS (Score:2)
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
Re: Load of BS (Score:2)
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
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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.
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I was thinking about the fact that our bodies breathe in cold air and breathe out warmer air. We heat the planet more than e-mails.
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I guess breathing contributes more to Global Warming that e-mail.
Guess again.
The carbon that we breathe out comes from renewable sources - plants that we either eat directly or feed to our meat sources. Yes, there is a carbon footprint attached to our food industry but that's from the energy we use for producing the food, not from breathing.
No Guess again. As you increase the number of people relative to the natural elements that sequester carbon, forests, grass lands, oceanic plant life, etc. Human consumption of carbon based food and subsequent respiration pull more carbon out of sunk sources and put in the atmosphere. Unless you can make the argument your existence has not resulted in the clearing of any additional land, and you have never consumed any food people did not explicitly plant as agriculture (ie picked a wild apple in the woods
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No Guess again. As you increase the number of people relative to the natural elements that sequester carbon, forests, grass lands, oceanic plant life, etc. Human consumption of carbon based food and subsequent respiration pull more carbon out of sunk sources and put in the atmosphere.
Aren't these arguments silly though? We're busy arguing about paper vs electronic mail, what people eat, cow farts, Reagan's trees, and other goofy things, when the problem is twofold. Too many humans requiring re-release of sequestered carbon.
Unless of course, a person doesn't believe in physics, then any discussion of the energy retention effects of an atmosphere based on it's composition is moot, because belief trumps science.
What a load of shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Things that contribute far more to global warming than e-mail:
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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.
Re: What a load of shit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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I bet java does a LOT too.
After all more than a billion of devices run it instead of something more efficient.
what "ai" model? WHAT THE FU????? (Score:3)
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...
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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
Meanwhile, Microsoft is planning... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I guess they didn't consider (Score:2)
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.
Re: I guess they didn't consider (Score:2)
It could be. Thats a topic of another discussion, but storage of unused potential is the basis of most efficiency models.
What a silly thought! (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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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.
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Re: Alternatives (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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It's mostly spam these days. I don't get a package every day but I do get postal spam every day.
Just Spam (Score:2)
And the trillions of messages from Amazon "Got your order", "Will ship soon", "Just shipped" and so on.
More data centre fear-mongering (Score:2)
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)
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Ok doomer (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah that pretty much says it.
I really wish I'd thought of it.
PHBs cause Global Warming (Score:2)
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
1 Billion Bitcoins, or We CC the planet! (Score:2)
How much of this is archived spam? (Score:2)
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 -
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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
Huh? (Score:2)
2.5 quintillion bytes of data (Score:2)
2.4 quintillion bytes of which is shitty Microsoft formatting in HTML emails to say "OK, will do".
Most I get from the higher-ups do (Score:2)
They sure contain a lot of hot air.
Blaming emails is a bit like (Score:2)
Just store it in a black hole. (Score:2)
(Somewhat relevant: What's the effect if one of an entangled particle pair is sent to a black hole?)
EVERYTHING DOES DUH (Score:2)
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
It's all relative (Score:2)
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.
Do what I do (Score:4, Funny)
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.
"Required to preserve them" (Score:2)
Blame spammers (Score:3)
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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.
Email footprint (Score:2)
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.
negativity to true costs of something we all hate? (Score:3)
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).
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 post contributes to global warming! (Score:2)
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!
Sure they do,but that's the wrong question. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Stop wasting power for e-mails! (Score:2)
Old Yeller (Score:2)
Ads are the real problem (Score:3)
Ad networks waste more energy than anything else in computing. Ad networks consume vast amounts of energy running in the most inefficient way possible.
Contradictory and meadering (Score:2)
"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.
sensationalism (Score:2)
Wha? (Score:3)
Cut back on surveillance instead (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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email is trivial
From what I've seen, a lot of it is stupid too.