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Okay, Chelsea, this week I have what could be not necessarily a bad news article, probably

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a bad news article, but more of a fun bad news article.

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I'm saying that because I've only read the headline so far, but it seems like a fun

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bad news kind of article.

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I always love just vague feelings before we actually read anything about the article.

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I really need this to be a category of fun bad news just because it'll make my categorizing

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more than just bad news.

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You really do need something other than just plain bad news.

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Bad news you didn't know about.

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Anyhow, there's a ton in that category.

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What I have here is it comes from The Guardian.

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It was published very recently, Friday, August 9th, by Helena Horton.

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Article title, excess memes and reply all emails are bad for climate researchers warn.

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Glad to know that about the people who are always replying all day everybody at my work

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and personally, hate it when people do that.

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Yeah, I think you can reply all to that.

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Don't you know you're ruining the planet or something along the lines now.

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Let's see if that's true or not.

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I'm gonna send this vertical.

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When I Can Has Cheeseburger became one of the first internet memes to blow our mind,

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it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up.

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But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is quote dark

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data unquote, meaning it is used once then never visited again.

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That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and

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family from all your base are belong to us through Ryan Gosling saying, hey girl to

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the Tim Waltz with a piglet are out there somewhere sitting in a data center using up

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energy.

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And by 2030 the national grid anticipates that data centers will account for just under

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6% of the UK's total electricity consumption.

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So tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.

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Ian Hodgk, a professor of strategy at Lowborough University, never heard of that.

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Louborough?

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Lowborough, I don't know.

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A British university has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can

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be reduced.

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Here's a quote from him.

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I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative

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environmental impact that digital data might have.

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And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually

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it's a whole lot more complex.

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But absolutely data does have a negative environmental impact.

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He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again and estimates that the

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personal data tells the same story.

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Hodgkinson again, if we think about individuals and society more broadly, what we found is

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that many still assume that data is carbon neutral.

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But every piece of data, whether it be an image, whether it be an Instagram post, whatever

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it is, there's a carbon footprint attached to it.

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So when we're storing things in the cloud, we think about the white fluffy cloud, but

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the reality is that these are data centers which are incredibly hot, incredibly noisy,

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and they consume a large amount of energy.

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End of quote.

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One funny meme isn't going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored

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unused in people's camera rolls have an impact, he explained.

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Quote, the one picture isn't going to make a drastic impact.

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But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures

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that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite an impression in terms of energy consumption.

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End quote.

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Cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to stop people from deleting junk

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data as the more data that is stored, the more people pay to use the systems.

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Again Hodgkinson quote, we're paying for that storage.

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Now effectively you're paying for something which you're not ever going to use again

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because you're not even aware it exists.

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And when we think about the significant costs it has for financial terms, but also the environment

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to the bigger picture, we're falling short of the required trajectory to meet that zero

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by 2050.

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There may be other big contributors to greenhouse gas emissions which maybe haven't been picked

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up.

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And we could certainly argue that data is one of those and it will grow and get bigger.

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Particularly think about that huge explosion, but also we know through forecast that in

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the next year or two, if we take all the renewable energy in the world, that wouldn't be enough

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to accommodate the amount of energy data requires.

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So that's quite a scary thought.

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End quote.

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One thing people can do to stop the data juggernaut, he said, is to send fewer pointless emails.

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Quote.

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One figure that often does the rounds is that for every standard email that equates to about

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four grams of carbon.

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If we then think about the amount of what we mainly call legacy data that we hold, so

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if we think about all the digital photos that we have for instance, there will be a

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cumulative impact.

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And of course we have the dreaded reply all button, which Hawkins can also add quote,

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if we think that our email or the data we produce is carbon neutral, we will never ask

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the question of ourselves in terms of if I do X, what's the consequence.

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And so when we think about the likes of different analytics, we think about things like chat

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GVT for instance.

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Again, for many individuals, they believe that to be carbon neutral, but it isn't.

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So asking yourselves those questions, which we've never really asked before within the

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organizations and individuals can make such a big difference for behavioral change.

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That's the end of the story.

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My first question, I don't get the reply all because I just generally delete those.

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Yeah, I get that.

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I get why they go out sometimes because it can be important information.

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A lot of them are just bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy in my mind and don't

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actually put out that much information.

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Most reply all said I've ever seen shouldn't be a reply all.

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Although I've always heard in response to a meeting, couldn't this be an email?

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I wonder what the difference in energy output would be for a zoom call versus a reply all

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email.

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I think we're thinking of it differently.

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Usually the reply all.

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Oh, no, I, I, I understand what you're saying.

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It's completely pointless things where it's an email that went out and somebody said like,

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what does this mean or something?

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They accidentally hit reply all.

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Yes.

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Instead of a reply.

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Yeah.

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My second, it's more of an observation than a question.

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I was at first thinking that they were going in just like the internet itself, just like

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in the creation of means and the floating out there and like the internet ether was having

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some sort of carbon footprint, but it's the storage of all the photos that I back up,

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but never look at again.

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Well, Chelsea, this is the weird thing we need to conceptualize.

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There is no internet per se.

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What you're accessing is data storage more or less.

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You're going into somebody's storage data.

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Like when we're talking about somebody's paying for those websites to be up, they're

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being stored on the server somewhere.

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So you're going into that server just through an ethernet cable more or less.

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So is my MySpace profile still out there having a carbon footprint?

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I highly doubt it at this point, but I can't confirm that for sure.

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Okay.

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Back to the reply all.

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How was our reply all having a bad carbon footprint?

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Where is it being stored somewhere?

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Yeah.

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Everything gets stored.

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If you go back and look at it, then it's being stored somewhere.

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And if it's not being stored by you, it might be being backed up by your company or whatever

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server you're paying for somewhere within.

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Part of this is the profit incentive that you're using up data or storage space to do

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so so they can charge you more as you're going to use more spaces that keeps accumulating.

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Right.

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Okay.

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So even because I just immediately believed it.

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See, I thought they're talking about you shouldn't reply all with like a super funny

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meme that you saw and then it makes it worse because then everybody else stores it because

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they think it's so funny.

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It's not even that.

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You don't know how many people don't delete in that reply all.

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Even then, even if they do delete, you don't know what that server's policy is on retaining

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deleted information.

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So I need to add something to my signature that says, please delete this email and think

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about your carbon footprint.

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Please put a magnet to your servers after reading this email.

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I think is actually what it should say.

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Okay.

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Girls Monday, firstly.

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I think that's all I have to add.

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I've never paid for it, but I know a ton of people who pay for like the Apple cloud for

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the extra space or the Google or Microsoft.

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It's paid for something similar.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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They have an incentive for you to keep all that crap that you're never going to see

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again.

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Oh, I can tell you, but 100% sure.

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I'm not the same person that I am when I started using it and there's stuff that I'll

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never look at again in which they're in case I need it.

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But because it's a profit structure, they have an incentive never to fix that for you.

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I'm not going to do it.

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I don't want to look at that stuff.

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I find it hilarious because this reminds me of that whole idea of this is AI and this

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is cryptocurrency too.

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These are industries that don't seem to produce anything but pollution and will be the perfect

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bad guy in like a Captain Planet episode or the raccoons per se.

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Maybe that's what that like industry did in the raccoons because I can't remember for

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sure.

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I don't know guys, what were they up to?

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It was so ahead of its time.

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And it's perfect because out of all things that we don't know that are creating pollution,

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that are like things actually creating pollution, you would never think that it's something

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digital, like memes that we're paying for.

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No, and that's because we have such a weird like the cloud makes you think that it's not

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somewhere physically, but it is.

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Everything is somewhere physically.

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I would have never thought it was anywhere physical.

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I just want to bring up because I tried to touch on it earlier.

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There's kind of like a meme out there of if you're having a meeting, couldn't this have

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been an email?

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But I'm wondering of the carbon footprint of a meeting that's on Zoom versus an email.

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And if that's a difference, of course, if you're going to save and record that meeting,

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yes, probably worse still.

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Maybe just an in-person meeting or phone call.

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Maybe the meme will reverse back to couldn't this have been an in-person meeting?

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Save the planet.

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And yeah, maybe this makes you rethink life in some way.

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It probably won't.

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We're not people of change.

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We are people of speaking of weird things.

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We are.

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We are people of podcast.

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If you're going to do it, you got 48 hours because I don't expect you to remember this

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after you're blown away on Friday when you listen to that episode.

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Exactly that.

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Anyhow, bye.

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Thanks for watching this morning's animation, talk to my community and I look forward to