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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: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 27 2020, @05:26PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday January 27 2020, @05:26PM (#949407) Journal
    That's probably true by number, but it's probably not true by power consumption. Most of the spam sent to my mail server is rejected. The stuff that ends up arriving in my inbox is trivial, the amount that ends up in my spam folder (where it gets delivered to clients and backed up) is a fairly small proportion of the total. The biggest wastes for me are:
    • Mailing lists. Most of the emails I get on high-volume mailing lists (e.g. llvm-dev) are put in a folder that the mail server backs up, sync'd with a few clients, but I never read more than the subjects and dive into only a couple of them. I'd love to see an IMAP extension where these could remain hosted only on their canonical server and be imported into my server's namespace. The Dovecot mailing list makes its archives available as an anonymous read-only IMAP folder, but there's no good way in most (any?) mail services of just pointing at that and just recording which are read for each user locally. I'd love to see mailing lists use a system like that.
    • Redundant HTML mail. A typical email from most mail clients is a couple of hundred bytes of data plus a few KBs of boilerplate HTML. A load of people include an image in their mail signature, bloating a 100 byte email to 5-10KB per message. Not a lot individually, but if you do that when sending to a mailing list that overhead adds up a lot. Some mail servers will pull out attachments and store them in deduplicated storage, but not all. Even if the server does, IMAP will still download all of the duplicates (though JMAP, I believe, has a mechanism for avoiding this).

      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.

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