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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 hendrikboom on Monday January 27 2020, @12:45PM (3 children)
Back when there was a video rental industry, I could walk to my local video store, and it did not consume oil to do so.
Then the local ones closed, and there remained one movie-connoisseur video rental service on the other side of the city.
A few months ago it closed too.
My available selection of video has gone down. Lots of stuff on Netflix, but lots of classic stuff that used to be available in the video rental store is just inaccessible. Balkanisation of video streaming is making it all worse.
In case someone asks, here in Canada Netflix was never a DVD rental service.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 27 2020, @01:02PM
That's why P2P will always exist in some form.
We should disintermediate the network architecture, too, though, for long-term survivability.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Monday January 27 2020, @01:23PM (1 child)
Just to be nit-picky, that video (and all the millions of copies) were made of plastic that came from oil. Heaven forbid it was a big old VHS cassette - lots of plastic in the box, lots of plastic in the tape shell, and the tape itself was plastic. DVDs and BluRays are not as bad.
Streaming a digital movie a million times is essentially cost-free: all it costs is a pointer into the shared video file per stream.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday February 02 2020, @10:59PM
Well, there is still the cost of having a network.