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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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.
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