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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:47PM (#949299)

    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

    by theluggage (1797) on Monday January 27 2020, @04:11PM (#949372)

    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 ...

    ...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...