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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 27 2020, @01:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the worth-the-cost? dept.

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?"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-25/cutting-back-on-sending-emails-could-help-fight-global-warming


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday January 27 2020, @01:04PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 27 2020, @01:04PM (#949287) Homepage Journal

    I have two filing cabinets containing paper files. Most of them are filed away and never looked at again until the day I go through it all and throw away stuff I know I'll never use. But I have to go through it page by page to make sure I don't throw away still-important documents that have been misfiled, such as my children's baptismal certificates, which I found in a pile of 20-year-old tax return receipts.

    But when I file it away it's not clear which one percent of those files I'll ever need again. That's why they were kept. And the manual purges are necessary so that I have enough room for everything.

    But electronically, storing a few terabytes now is no more expensive than storing a few gigabytes two decades ago, and cheaper than storing a few megabytes back in the 80's. Purging isn't important. Even if I were to purge back to a gigabyte, they don't make disks that small any more, so what's the point?

    What *is* still important is proper organization and indexing of all those data. And that's hard. Technical aids very welcome. If they work.

    -- hendrik

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