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Everyone has seen the warning. At the bottom of the email, it says: "Please consider the environment before printing." But for those who care about global warming, you might want to consider not writing so many emails in the first place.
More and more, people rely on their electronic mailboxes as a life organizer. Old emails, photos, and files from years past sit undisturbed, awaiting your search for a name, lost address, or maybe a photo of an old boyfriend. The problem is that all those messages require energy to preserve them. And despite the tech industry's focus on renewables, the advent of streaming and artificial intelligence is only accelerating the amount of fossil fuels burned to keep data servers up, running, and cool.
Right now, data centers consume about 2% of the world's electricity, but that's expected to reach 8% by 2030. Moreover, only about 6% of all data ever created is in use today, according to research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means that 94% is sitting in a vast "cyber landfill," albeit one with a massive carbon footprint.
"It's costing us the equivalent of maintaining the airline industry for data we don't even use," says Andrew Choi, a senior research analyst at Parnassus Investments, a $27 billion environmental, social, and governance firm in San Francisco.
[...] Choi says the problem is getting too big too fast: How many photos are sitting untouched in the cloud? Is there a net benefit from an internet-connected toothbrush? Is an AI model that enables slightly faster food delivery really worth the energy cost? (Training an AI model emits about as much carbon as the lifetime emissions associated with running five cars.)
Parnassus has been focusing on Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, companies that are researching more efficient storage technology. But Choi says real solutions may require more radical thoughts.
"Data is possibly overstated as an advantage for business, and no one's really asking the question," he says. "If a small group of people are the only ones really benefiting from this data revolution, then what are we actually doing, using all of this power?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:54AM (9 children)
At least e-mail is to get stuff done. Social networks are a drain on society, the world, and anything involved in them.
Start cutting down on those first.
I can run an e-mail service for hundreds of thousands of people with only a small percentage of the impact that their social network usage has.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Monday January 27 2020, @02:02AM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday January 27 2020, @06:01AM (1 child)
"Ow, My balls!" must be watched in Ultra High Definition.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 27 2020, @12:58PM
I love that show, almost as much as the epic film, Ass.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 27 2020, @11:54AM
Concur that the headline is nonsense. Sending typed or handwritten notes in the mail takes far more energy than an email.
Video is the big data using monster. The most prolific writers bang out perhaps 20k text per day. Most people write far less than 10k. At 10k every day, a lifetime of writing (between 65 and 70 years) uses roughly 250M of storage. Data compression can probably knock that down to less than 100M. Video of course can vary widely in resolution and lossy compression quality settings, but 100M won't get you very far. That can be a measly 10 minutes of 720p video of fairly high quality.
They're not distinguishing between text only emails and emails with huge attachments. The most common attachment is, I'm sure, photos. Video would be more common, but that tends to be so large that many email systems will reject it. That's an important distinction, and to ignore it as the article does, makes their conclusion highly problematic.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 27 2020, @02:21AM
Yes, and I really need to get something done. Prince Foozy Woozy, from Nigeria, is waiting for my banking details. I've really got to get that done!!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday January 27 2020, @03:33AM (1 child)
You're discussing the value of the information (which is fairly subjective), versus the motivations. Decent email services will deduplicate and archive attachments, which is to say they have some levels of efficiency. Social networks probably have even greater levels of efficiency in storing the data. Storing a picture or attachment 10 times per employee may not kill a single corporate server, but makes millions of dollars of difference for Google and Facebook.
There isn't great value in discussing the personal value that information has to people anyways. It may be stupid to you, but a treasured email to me. Likewise, I have extremely low opinions of any data on social networks, but I'm not oblivious to the sentimental value it has to others.
Where there is value, is the discussion regarding government and corporate data. Some data shouldn't be stored at all (invasive marketing information), and other data is mandated by law. Different industries and institutions have their own archiving and compliance solutions. I want the energy spent to archive compliance data in financial institutions.
Does this even really make a difference though compared to all the waste? Our systems are not on-demand storing data "cold" at rest. Spinning drives can idle and reduce power, but most operating systems are not very good at reducing power when the systems are idle. The cost of being able to bring up that old post in less than 10 seconds, versus a 10 minute waiting period should be discussed. That's our fast-food instant-gratification lifestyle there for you.
There is so much more idle waste to tackle (like AC adapters in walls), that arguing about sending less emails is rather pointless.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Monday January 27 2020, @12:37PM
The one doesn't preclude the other. There are many bad / wrongheaded laws.
--
Fibonacci: it's as easy as 1, 1, 2, 3
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 27 2020, @04:32AM (1 child)
54 percent of email is spam.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 27 2020, @05:26PM
Attachment stupidity. Even on geek mailing lists, the number of people that include a screenshot of a terminal, rather than copying and pasting the text, is embarrassing. With non-technical users, it's fairly common to get a 1MB Word document embedding an image that would be 100KB with a sane lossless format, to show you 200 bytes of text. People often send large multi-MB photos as attachments when a recompressed 100KB version would be completely adequate. A mail client could offer to recompress these and reduce the size, but I don't know of any that do automatically (or, in fact, at all, though there's almost certainly a Thunderbird add-on that does).
Spam is a pretty small proportion of the overhead, in comparison to this. Spam senders want to maximise the number of recipients, so tend to keep the message size pretty small.
sudo mod me up