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: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:47AM (1 child)
Your move.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @03:05AM
Thank you for subscribing to our marketing emails by simply visiting this website. You will receive approximately 85 emails per day from our affiliate partners. If you wish to opt out please call our call center located in Shitstainia India. Calling our call center will automatically register your phone number with our partner site located in China.
Your move.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Monday January 27 2020, @01:51AM (3 children)
is from Bloomberg - supposedly the best source of investment data.
We are doomed all right.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:58AM (2 children)
Bloomberg is also obviously not a Lakers fan [twitter.com]
The MSM are done aren't they?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @03:06AM
Nakers rise up!
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday January 27 2020, @07:14AM
Sounds edited
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:54AM (9 children)
At least e-mail is to get stuff done. Social networks are a drain on society, the world, and anything involved in them.
Start cutting down on those first.
I can run an e-mail service for hundreds of thousands of people with only a small percentage of the impact that their social network usage has.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Monday January 27 2020, @02:02AM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday January 27 2020, @06:01AM (1 child)
"Ow, My balls!" must be watched in Ultra High Definition.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 27 2020, @12:58PM
I love that show, almost as much as the epic film, Ass.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 27 2020, @11:54AM
Concur that the headline is nonsense. Sending typed or handwritten notes in the mail takes far more energy than an email.
Video is the big data using monster. The most prolific writers bang out perhaps 20k text per day. Most people write far less than 10k. At 10k every day, a lifetime of writing (between 65 and 70 years) uses roughly 250M of storage. Data compression can probably knock that down to less than 100M. Video of course can vary widely in resolution and lossy compression quality settings, but 100M won't get you very far. That can be a measly 10 minutes of 720p video of fairly high quality.
They're not distinguishing between text only emails and emails with huge attachments. The most common attachment is, I'm sure, photos. Video would be more common, but that tends to be so large that many email systems will reject it. That's an important distinction, and to ignore it as the article does, makes their conclusion highly problematic.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 27 2020, @02:21AM
Yes, and I really need to get something done. Prince Foozy Woozy, from Nigeria, is waiting for my banking details. I've really got to get that done!!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday January 27 2020, @03:33AM (1 child)
You're discussing the value of the information (which is fairly subjective), versus the motivations. Decent email services will deduplicate and archive attachments, which is to say they have some levels of efficiency. Social networks probably have even greater levels of efficiency in storing the data. Storing a picture or attachment 10 times per employee may not kill a single corporate server, but makes millions of dollars of difference for Google and Facebook.
There isn't great value in discussing the personal value that information has to people anyways. It may be stupid to you, but a treasured email to me. Likewise, I have extremely low opinions of any data on social networks, but I'm not oblivious to the sentimental value it has to others.
Where there is value, is the discussion regarding government and corporate data. Some data shouldn't be stored at all (invasive marketing information), and other data is mandated by law. Different industries and institutions have their own archiving and compliance solutions. I want the energy spent to archive compliance data in financial institutions.
Does this even really make a difference though compared to all the waste? Our systems are not on-demand storing data "cold" at rest. Spinning drives can idle and reduce power, but most operating systems are not very good at reducing power when the systems are idle. The cost of being able to bring up that old post in less than 10 seconds, versus a 10 minute waiting period should be discussed. That's our fast-food instant-gratification lifestyle there for you.
There is so much more idle waste to tackle (like AC adapters in walls), that arguing about sending less emails is rather pointless.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Monday January 27 2020, @12:37PM
The one doesn't preclude the other. There are many bad / wrongheaded laws.
--
Fibonacci: it's as easy as 1, 1, 2, 3
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 27 2020, @04:32AM (1 child)
54 percent of email is spam.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 27 2020, @05:26PM
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.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @02:05AM (4 children)
Hahahaha, good page title. Email... yeah, right, and meanwhile ignore:
- all the ads, with associated network load, server work tracking people and building "big data", etc.
- all the video tutorials, press releases, etc that could be a text with some small photos. Tired of mumbling people wasting 10 minutes, making it "funnier" with their text corrections overlaid in the video, instead of re-recording that part. Paint strokes require video, musical instrument too... but 3D-app "click this 5 things to get that option" is fine with text and pictures. Multimedia, not always video, you morons.
- all those process twice "because frameworks". Current "favourite" is asshole sites that send you some kind of markup and JS to convert that to HTML. Or send you 8K pictures that on screen render smaller than 1K, and no link to view bigger ("view image" is power user magic, all other users have been "de-trained" about context menu or shortcuts).
Other points are the issue, email worked with less powerful computers 20-30 years ago, now it is the smallest factor. Yet I doubt we will see "please consider not wasting electricity with [ ads | useless videos | stupid programming fads | etc ]" to become common warning all over the corporate place like some emails footers did decades ago.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @02:15AM (2 children)
Using i.reddit.com or old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com will save up to 4 mb of environment every page load. How many emails is that on average?
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Monday January 27 2020, @09:16AM
using old.reddit.com will also show all the comments if you browse with a no script plugin
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday January 27 2020, @12:39PM
What are the technical differences between those reddits that make them more efficient?
(Score: 5, Funny) by takyon on Monday January 27 2020, @03:36AM
All of this wasteful stuff will take up less energy over time. More efficient home computers, server hardware, optical links, video codecs, etc.
That's when we hit the environmentalists with 32K resolution [soylentnews.org] streaming VR video and multi-terabyte game patches.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Barenflimski on Monday January 27 2020, @02:07AM (1 child)
I'm guessing the author did not scratch out this content on the back of a coconut leaf.
While there are some good and interesting points in this article it appears that "stop writing emails" was the most click-baity.
--
"I peeked, you peaked, we all piqued at a lemon." - Anonymous
(Score: 4, Informative) by vux984 on Monday January 27 2020, @03:31AM
Ironically click bait is itself a waste of energy. Page loads, network traffic, and all that assorted energy use to display a bunch of worthless content that people would have properly ignored and passed over if they hadn't been successfully baited into clicking it.
Then when you add on all the crapflood of ads, trackers, and frameworks to present the clickbait it amplifies it further.
One of those cases where if the author wants to make a positive contribution to the world, they can do the most good by not contributing.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @02:13AM (5 children)
Once again environmentalists are out, not because they want to protect the environment, but because they get a power trip from ruining things that people are doing to actually make life better.
Streaming, a large portion of which is powered by renewable energy, replaced travel to the video store, which consumes far more energy, almost all of it oil.
That's a big ol' nope. While data centers consume about 2% of energy and airlines about 2.5%, once again airlines are almost all oil. But data center power usage has almost no relation to data stored. Most of the power is consumed by CPUs, not disk drives. A SSD consumes essentially zero energy for data in storage, and even a mechanical drive consumes only about 15W, less than a CPU does at idle (and data centers hate when their CPUs are idle). Data in cold storage doesn't use any power at all, and I'd be pretty surprised if Google doesn't try to find ways to keep data offline where possible.
Once you realize that that model works by cutting down on miles traveled and time idling, it probably is worth it, yes.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:15PM
Sure, but can we please just say that cutting back on e-mail to fight global warming is idotic, rather than make a big us and them war?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @03:03AM (3 children)
Fuck Beta !
Fuck Gretta !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @03:08AM (2 children)
Is "Gretta" 17 years old?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday January 27 2020, @12:47PM (1 child)
What's the age of consent in Sweden?
And do you perhaps mean Greta?
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @07:33PM
You want to change her climate?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DrkShadow on Monday January 27 2020, @03:20AM (1 child)
companies are well aware of how much all of this is costing them.
They're aware of every last thousand dollars. That's why SmugMug just deleted the years-old caches of many photographers -- anyone with over 1000 pictures that wasn't subscribed. It's not worth it, financially. For some others, it is. For Walmart, it allows them to determine a relationship between pop-tarts and hurricanes, and stock their shelves accordingly (and effectively).
As more companies move to the cloud, and see a dollar amount associated with their storage cost ($4000/mo?! You have to make it cheaper! A $50 000 SAN?!?), the companies will address these issues. In fact, the reduction of this waste is the sole greatest attribute of Capitalism. (Drawbacks: it's cheaper to pay to let things sit than to have someone spend time trimming them. Positive: data retention policies -- delete this category of data after 3 years.)
The actual users will pay in monthly Office 365 subscriptions, and whatthehellisgoogleevendoing. (Mining for advertising effectively, I guess.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DrkShadow on Monday January 27 2020, @03:23AM
-- running five cars for a lifetime (five years? seven?). That, to serve 150 000 people. That seems like a _great_ return! It seems like only in the modern era can we even dream of such a tight return on production!
Wow, imagine how many _cars_ 150 000 people drive...
(Also, pretty sure that an IoT toothbrush isn't training that kind of model, but alas, this is a dumb article for dumb people that like to react with jerking movements.)
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday January 27 2020, @03:25AM (1 child)
Somewhere some idiot is reading the article and thinking to himself "derrr e-mail old. Good thin I use texting on my smart phone."
And somewhere else, some rich cell phone salesman is counting up the extra sales he made as a result of paying to have that article written.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 27 2020, @05:31PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Touché) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday January 27 2020, @04:30AM
Those climate models use entire supercomputers [insideclimatenews.org]. Just as with e-mail, their "data is possibly overstated as an advantage".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 27 2020, @04:51AM (1 child)
That's actually pretty good. I was expecting a few orders of magnitude less than that.
As long as the "small group" is paying for that storage and energy usage, what does it matter to him?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday January 27 2020, @01:04PM
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
(Score: 5, Insightful) by inertnet on Monday January 27 2020, @06:12AM (4 children)
Instead of cutting down on email I'm just blocking all ads, much more effective.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @01:03PM (3 children)
But the ads get delivered to your computer anyhow, you just don't see them because the ad-blocker sends them to /dev/null. So not only are you wasting energy, you're depriving advertisers on a chance to introduce you to their wonderful products.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday January 27 2020, @01:05PM (2 children)
Is that true? Isn't there a way of blocking ads so that they aren't downloaded at all?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @02:07PM (1 child)
from:
https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=44275&p=148574&hilit=save+bandwidth#p148574 [adblockplus.org]
Took some digging, but yes, you can block the ads from being downloaded or from being displayed (I think the latter is for sites that check that the ads are sent before sending content).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:18PM
From your quote it seems to be the default to remove ads and not download them.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by zugedneb on Monday January 27 2020, @09:14AM
Have a cousin who works in energy sector in germany...
Over a lunch, he held a lecture about how the demise of the paper industry cuz of electronic exchange decimated the need for powwa in europe...
Also, as example, not even universities in sweden subscribe to a tenth of the amount of monthly papers as they did 20 years ago. Mostly the electronic version of the papers is hardlocked to the university domain, and u can just go to the site and read the damn papers.
But, generally, i agree that we should go back to paper, so that we can save humanity. Or maybe poke out our own eyes, maybe :D
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @09:49AM
you want to fight global warming.
Yours Sincerely Getta Whoreborg
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @10:36AM (1 child)
Are the so-called "left" in a competition to outcraze each other, or what?
Someone please calculate the carbon footprint of incessantly spamming all of us with this bullshit.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 27 2020, @01:06PM
The left will reach peak crazy if Trump wins re-election. Jonestown redux.
Washington DC delenda est.
(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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday January 27 2020, @06:21PM
...they cut back on the damned JavaScript. In the 1990s, email was email, with an email client. It was text. Then came HTML mail, and that was the beginning of the end. HTML mail adds almost nothing to the conversation, and from a security standpoint it vastly increases that attack surface but nevermind that. It opened the door to webmail, infested with Javascript that involves orders or magnitude more downloading, and CPU cycles where there were none before. If you want to do something about this, take your provider up on the IMAP option--most of them offer it, and in some cases it can be significantly leaner.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @03:57AM
The substitutes for email consume even more energy.
Blocking ads saves more.