By Jo Nova
So you hit “Reply All” and ten years later the heatwaves begin. You know it makes sense — the global cloud is full of cat videos, and storing the code that made Socks sing Bohemian Catsody in a million emails requires another data centre. And as the old copies accumulate the “dark data” that no one looks at piles up. And those servers need electricity.
If only we had cheap reliable, renewable energy sources that worked 24 hours a day, we wouldn’t have to worry, would we? But data centers that only work when the wind blows are not much use to anyone (except maybe Hillary and Hunter). But the awful truth is that the more data we store the more CO2 we produce. Thus in the cult of climate change, the O-so-human quest to connect needs to be suppressed so we can cool the world by a thousandth of a degree in 2143.
Anyone who liked humans would just say “build a nuclear plant”. (Anyone who liked plants would say “build a coal one”). That would solve it. But here we are in the modern era and professors are effectively telling us that our emails are killing koalas.
Excess memes and ‘reply all’ emails are bad for climate, researcher warns
Most data stored on power-hungry servers is used once then never looked at again
By Helena Horton, The Guardian
… research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK’s total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.
Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced. He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and estimates that personal data tells the same story.
Hodgkinson said: “If we think about individuals and society more broadly, what we found is that many still assume that data is carbon neutral, but every piece of data whether it be an image, whether it be an Instagram post, whatever it is, there’s a carbon footprint attached to it.
Send less emails, and save the world!
One thing people can do to stop the data juggernaut, he said, is to send fewer pointless emails: “One [figure] that often does the rounds is that for every standard email, that equates to about 4g of carbon.
Think of all the days you wake up saying to yourself, I’d like to send 100 pointless emails. Well, those days are over.
Imagine how much better our quality of life will be if we have a struggle session and self-assess every SMS, every message, wondering if we deserve to share a funny story when it might inundate the nursing home in fifty years? The Green philosophy is so uplifting.
Good luck to any EcoWorrier who has to convince their teenage daughter not to share memes to save the planet. What are they going to do, drive their offspring in a car to visit their friends instead? Lordy, think, of the carbon penance! Not that it would be a bad thing if we spent more time visiting real people instead of “sharing” with electric gadgets, but that’s the thing about the carbon religion, it’s not giving us more freedom to do anything at all.
Soon the social credit score will tell you how many messages you can send and how many photos you can store.
First they came for the cars, and then they came for the emails. It only ends when we make them stop.