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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: 2) by Subsentient on Monday January 27 2020, @10:55AM (4 children)
I run my own email server on a cute little Intel Atom NUC I got for $100 on Amazon. Uses a small 12V wall wart as power.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday January 27 2020, @01:06PM (2 children)
That leaves two possibilities:
(a) you only exchange emails with people in your house - in which case you could maybe try, you know, talking to people or upcycling some junk-mail envelopes as note pads.
(b) your email server is getting its feed from one or more smarthosts running on some dual Xeon space heater in an expensively air-conditioned data centre somewhere, and all you're achieving is using one 12V wall-wart's worth more energy than if all your devices just IMAP'd directly to your provider or used webmail.
For clarity, I'm not chucking any bricks in that particular greenhouse and have plenty of unnecessary gadgets wasting trickles of energy, but that's a mere smear of dogshit in my carbon footprint c.f. a few dozen transatlantic flights over the last couple of decades and the general inefficiency of being a single person. Not all of our environmental problems can be fixed by the IT equivalent of eating a vegan hamburger - they need massive infrastructure re-thinks. When nations are run by people who, at best, can't explain the difference between heat and temperature or, at worst, think the world was created in 4004BC and stocked with fossil fuels for the exclusive use of the sky fairy's creations, good luck with that. I didn't vote for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:47PM (1 child)
i am looking into this. pop or imap to some certified and encrypted and secure email hording monster service.
the poping and imaping being done by a small home server, which after fetch tells the data hording ancient email beast to DELETE its local copy (yeah right,lol).
then i can web-interface or pop or imap AGAIN to under my control little server (12V? sounds like a job for Mr.Solar(tm)) without having to mess with all
those damn phony invented security and encryption and domain identity confirming crap (which btw was only invented AFTER the big monsters PAID to be
SPAMMED and thus requiring a solution which ostensibly locked out all fly-by-night own email domain users).
sure now it's one place that fails and all shit is gone, but i can VPN to it from anywhre in the world, from different devices too: iPhony, crapdroid, winblues or linux, no problem!
and yes sir, i don't need to provide a "two-factor-address book-oh-there's a JOIN statement" telephone number to a 3rd party ...
and some far away future, email will be pull not push and all the spam will have to be hosted by the spammers until fetched, instead of being able to WRITE (push) it willy-nilly onto some remote data storage device ...
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday January 27 2020, @04:11PM
...how would that work? Your system would have to poll every other system in the world that might possibly have a message for you, and then somehow figure out whether or not it was spam without downloading it. Or maybe the transaction could start with a "I have a message for you" message - but then you're back to the problem of detecting spam without downloading it.
You can setup a whitelist system with existing tools if you're happy not being able to receive email from strangers.
...and before you reach for the conspiracy theories, the fundamental problem is that we've taken a network infrastructure designed to connect a few hundred relatively trustworthy education and government establishments, including email and address resolution protocols designed with no thought for identity checking, and expanded it to the point where people want domain names for their doorbells...
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 27 2020, @05:38PM
How many people use your mail server? 12W/user seems pretty high, given that you can host a few thousand users on a single cloud VM, which can share CPU with a dozen other VMs on a single system with a power budget of a few hundred W. Mail is a very low CPU and low RAM consumer and is very bursty, so works very well in a cloud environment.
How do you back up the storage that your NUC uses? That 12W looks pretty low if it's including even RAID, let alone off-site backups.
sudo mod me up