Okay, Chelsea, this week I have what could be not necessarily a bad news article, probably
a bad news article, but more of a fun bad news article.
I'm saying that because I've only read the headline so far, but it seems like a fun
bad news kind of article.
I always love just vague feelings before we actually read anything about the article.
I really need this to be a category of fun bad news just because it'll make my categorizing
more than just bad news.
You really do need something other than just plain bad news.
Bad news you didn't know about.
Anyhow, there's a ton in that category.
What I have here is it comes from The Guardian.
It was published very recently, Friday, August 9th, by Helena Horton.
Article title, excess memes and reply all emails are bad for climate researchers warn.
Glad to know that about the people who are always replying all day everybody at my work
and personally, hate it when people do that.
Yeah, I think you can reply all to that.
Don't you know you're ruining the planet or something along the lines now.
Let's see if that's true or not.
I'm gonna send this vertical.
When I Can Has Cheeseburger became one of the first internet memes to blow our mind,
it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up.
But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is quote dark
data unquote, 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
the Tim Waltz with a piglet are out there somewhere sitting in a data center using up
energy.
And by 2030 the national grid anticipates that data centers 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 Hodgk, a professor of strategy at Lowborough University, never heard of that.
Louborough?
Lowborough, I don't know.
A British university has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can
be reduced.
Here's a quote from him.
I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative
environmental impact that digital data might have.
And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually
it's a whole lot more complex.
But absolutely data does have a negative environmental impact.
He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again and estimates that the
personal data tells the same story.
Hodgkinson again, 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.
So when we're storing things in the cloud, we think about the white fluffy cloud, but
the reality is that these are data centers which are incredibly hot, incredibly noisy,
and they consume a large amount of energy.
End of quote.
One funny meme isn't going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored
unused in people's camera rolls have an impact, he explained.
Quote, the one picture isn't going to make a drastic impact.
But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures
that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite an impression in terms of energy consumption.
End quote.
Cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to stop people from deleting junk
data as the more data that is stored, the more people pay to use the systems.
Again Hodgkinson quote, we're paying for that storage.
Now effectively you're paying for something which you're not ever going to use again
because you're not even aware it exists.
And when we think about the significant costs it has for financial terms, but also the environment
to the bigger picture, we're falling short of the required trajectory to meet that zero
by 2050.
There may be other big contributors to greenhouse gas emissions which maybe haven't been picked
up.
And we could certainly argue that data is one of those and it will grow and get bigger.
Particularly think about that huge explosion, but also we know through forecast that in
the next year or two, if we take all the renewable energy in the world, that wouldn't be enough
to accommodate the amount of energy data requires.
So that's quite a scary thought.
End quote.
One thing people can do to stop the data juggernaut, he said, is to send fewer pointless emails.
Quote.
One figure that often does the rounds is that for every standard email that equates to about
four grams of carbon.
If we then think about the amount of what we mainly call legacy data that we hold, so
if we think about all the digital photos that we have for instance, there will be a
cumulative impact.
And of course we have the dreaded reply all button, which Hawkins can also add quote,
if we think that our email or the data we produce is carbon neutral, we will never ask
the question of ourselves in terms of if I do X, what's the consequence.
And so when we think about the likes of different analytics, we think about things like chat
GVT for instance.
Again, for many individuals, they believe that to be carbon neutral, but it isn't.
So asking yourselves those questions, which we've never really asked before within the
organizations and individuals can make such a big difference for behavioral change.
That's the end of the story.
My first question, I don't get the reply all because I just generally delete those.
Yeah, I get that.
I get why they go out sometimes because it can be important information.
A lot of them are just bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy in my mind and don't
actually put out that much information.
Most reply all said I've ever seen shouldn't be a reply all.
Although I've always heard in response to a meeting, couldn't this be an email?
I wonder what the difference in energy output would be for a zoom call versus a reply all
email.
I think we're thinking of it differently.
Usually the reply all.
Oh, no, I, I, I understand what you're saying.
It's completely pointless things where it's an email that went out and somebody said like,
what does this mean or something?
They accidentally hit reply all.
Yes.
Instead of a reply.
Yeah.
My second, it's more of an observation than a question.
I was at first thinking that they were going in just like the internet itself, just like
in the creation of means and the floating out there and like the internet ether was having
some sort of carbon footprint, but it's the storage of all the photos that I back up,
but never look at again.
Well, Chelsea, this is the weird thing we need to conceptualize.
There is no internet per se.
What you're accessing is data storage more or less.
You're going into somebody's storage data.
Like when we're talking about somebody's paying for those websites to be up, they're
being stored on the server somewhere.
So you're going into that server just through an ethernet cable more or less.
So is my MySpace profile still out there having a carbon footprint?
I highly doubt it at this point, but I can't confirm that for sure.
Okay.
Back to the reply all.
How was our reply all having a bad carbon footprint?
Where is it being stored somewhere?
Yeah.
Everything gets stored.
If you go back and look at it, then it's being stored somewhere.
And if it's not being stored by you, it might be being backed up by your company or whatever
server you're paying for somewhere within.
Part of this is the profit incentive that you're using up data or storage space to do
so so they can charge you more as you're going to use more spaces that keeps accumulating.
Right.
Okay.
So even because I just immediately believed it.
See, I thought they're talking about you shouldn't reply all with like a super funny
meme that you saw and then it makes it worse because then everybody else stores it because
they think it's so funny.
It's not even that.
You don't know how many people don't delete in that reply all.
Even then, even if they do delete, you don't know what that server's policy is on retaining
deleted information.
So I need to add something to my signature that says, please delete this email and think
about your carbon footprint.
Please put a magnet to your servers after reading this email.
I think is actually what it should say.
Okay.
Girls Monday, firstly.
I think that's all I have to add.
I've never paid for it, but I know a ton of people who pay for like the Apple cloud for
the extra space or the Google or Microsoft.
It's paid for something similar.
Yes.
Yeah.
They have an incentive for you to keep all that crap that you're never going to see
again.
Oh, I can tell you, but 100% sure.
I'm not the same person that I am when I started using it and there's stuff that I'll
never look at again in which they're in case I need it.
But because it's a profit structure, they have an incentive never to fix that for you.
I'm not going to do it.
I don't want to look at that stuff.
I find it hilarious because this reminds me of that whole idea of this is AI and this
is cryptocurrency too.
These are industries that don't seem to produce anything but pollution and will be the perfect
bad guy in like a Captain Planet episode or the raccoons per se.
Maybe that's what that like industry did in the raccoons because I can't remember for
sure.
I don't know guys, what were they up to?
It was so ahead of its time.
And it's perfect because out of all things that we don't know that are creating pollution,
that are like things actually creating pollution, you would never think that it's something
digital, like memes that we're paying for.
No, and that's because we have such a weird like the cloud makes you think that it's not
somewhere physically, but it is.
Everything is somewhere physically.
I would have never thought it was anywhere physical.
I just want to bring up because I tried to touch on it earlier.
There's kind of like a meme out there of if you're having a meeting, couldn't this have
been an email?
But I'm wondering of the carbon footprint of a meeting that's on Zoom versus an email.
And if that's a difference, of course, if you're going to save and record that meeting,
yes, probably worse still.
Maybe just an in-person meeting or phone call.
Maybe the meme will reverse back to couldn't this have been an in-person meeting?
Save the planet.
And yeah, maybe this makes you rethink life in some way.
It probably won't.
We're not people of change.
We are people of speaking of weird things.
We are.
We are people of podcast.
If you're going to do it, you got 48 hours because I don't expect you to remember this
after you're blown away on Friday when you listen to that episode.
Exactly that.
Anyhow, bye.
Thanks for watching this morning's animation, talk to my community and I look forward to