After the “Let the Earth Breathe” news circulated on my social media homepage, one of the things I have read is to delete unwanted/unread/spam emails as one of the means I can contribute to the mitigation of carbon emissions.
How true is this, and why?
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In: 8
Email uses TCP/IP packets sent between computers. All those computers and network boxes run on electricity. In many countries the grid is far from 100% renewable, so it takes carbon emissions to make the electricity to send the email. Nothing like the emissions to send a paper letter through the post, but hardly 0.
The device that you send it on uses energy to transmit the information. And maybe something about Shannon information? Or information has mass? But no size? I pulled that out of my drunkass ….. ass? Soz
Using Gmail as an example, your emails are stored in the cloud, i.e. a data center somewhere with hundreds of servers used for storing data. Organisations like Google are constantly building more and more data centers to satisfy their users’ need for cloud based storage and computing solutions. They also happen to need huge amounts of electricity to run.
I imagine their logic is something like this: if large amounts of people reduce the amount of web-based storage they use, then it will reduce the need for data centers and therefore lower carbon emissions?
Though in reality, I feel like a much larger contributor to this is automated backups of image / video content to the cloud. And even this likely pales in comparison to the carbon footprint for professional or industrial-scale cloud computing solutions.
In principle, any computing activity can *maybe* generate carbon emissions if the electricity used to carry it out was generated using fossil fuels. Emails are typically stored on servers, and the more emails there are to store, the more servers there have to be.
However, the carbon impact of an unread email is going to be miniscule. A cluttered inbox takes up a few gigabytes at most (Google starts charging after 15 GB). Modern servers typically run hard drives that can easily hold terabytes of memory – enough for thousands of people – stacked on top of each other. If these servers are organized smartly, most of your old emails are just sitting on a hard drive that rarely gets accessed, so only a baseline power is used to maintain it. It’s not like data storage is an energy-intensive activity all on its own.
At some level, all e-mails are bits of data being stored on a server. This implies if you delete the data, you are using less space on the server, which would mean that the server would use less power and there save energy, but that’s not really how it works.
The amount of space you have on a server is limited, and pre-allocated. It’s often in the gigabytes now a days, as many services like google also offer cloud storage for files as well out of the same server allocations. Deleting your e-mail isn’t going to significantly effect the amount of space you are using on the server, and it isn’t going to affect the amount of space allocated to you on the server either.
And storage space isn’t a major driver of power usage on a computer anyways. It’s computations, or actually making the computer doing anything that has a significant power cost. Most long term storage is non-volatile and doesn’t require power to store data anyways. This is why you don’t lose data on your hard drive when you turn your computer or phone off. In a lot of ways, telling the server to delete your e-mails probably has a higher power cost, as it needs to do all the processing required to understand what you are telling it to do, then spend the power required to flips the bits to indicate the space where that message was is free now.
And even then, the amount of power required to do that is trivial. You are probably using more power to stream 1 second of audio, simply because there is so much more data that needs to be transferred in an audio file.
Deleting an e-mail isn’t going to save power, nor is dealing with your e-mails a significant usage of power. This is completely false.
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