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Millions of unnecessary emails sent every day, including those that just say “thank you,” are a threat to the planet, scientists believe.
With the UN’s COP26 climate change summit taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, next year, organizers are looking for innovative ways to cut carbon emissions, and the footprint left by web users has caught their attention.
British officials have been particularly enthralled by research suggesting that in the UK, for example, more than 64 million unnecessary emails are sent every day, pumping thousands of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere due to the energy they produce. consume.
Multiply the number worldwide and the effects multiply.
“We have been looking at research that suggests that if you reduce those emails by just one a day, you will save a lot of carbon,” said a person involved in the preparations for COP26.
The issue of unnecessary emails was raised in a recent document from the National Center for Cyber Security, a London-based agency tasked with making the country’s online life safe. The center declined to comment.
Ministers have yet to receive courtesies and small talk online (officials say work is in a preliminary stage), but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants radical environmental action to be a hallmark of his tenure.
It is important to recognize that data traffic, such as email, has an energy and carbon penalty.
The carbon footprint of an email comes from the electricity used to power the devices on which it is written and read, the networks that transmit the data, and the data centers that store it.
Experts estimate that data centers account for less than 0.1 percent of the world’s carbon footprint, a small number compared to the 20 percent attributed to cars. However, emissions from data centers are increasing due to the increased use of online media such as video calling, gaming, and streaming.
‘One less email’
One piece of open source information officials are referring to relates to research commissioned by Ovo Energy last November, which suggested that if every person in the UK sent one less email a day, it could reduce the production of carbon by more than 16,000 tons per year.
The investigation claimed that it would be the equivalent of more than 80,000 people flying from London to Madrid. He found that the top 10 most “unnecessary” emails included messages that said only “thank you”, “appreciated”, “hello” and “LOL”.
“It is important to recognize that data traffic, like email, has an energy and carbon penalty,” said Susanne Baker, associate director of climate, environment and sustainability at TechUK, a nonprofit industry group.
However, he emphasized that the technology sector had invested heavily in increasing its use of renewable energy rather than fossil fuels, and said that some industry forecasts modeled a 50 percent reduction in carbon by 2030.
Other experts are wary of the idea of an email crackdown.
Mike Berners-Lee, a Lancaster University professor whose research was used to estimate the impact of reducing emails, said the estimated impact of each email was based on “back of the envelope” calculations in the work of 2010, and that it was only a small part of the emissions related to the technology sector.
While he said it was useful as a hook for broader conversations on climate change, Berners-Lee said it was vital to keep the emphasis on more important IT questions about whether the sector can contribute to a low-carbon world.
“The idea that [greater] efficiency automatically causes a reduction in carbon … it seems incredibly dubious, “he said. “The [efficiency] information storage, transmission and analysis has multiplied by millions, but … the carbon footprint of our information storage and transmission analysis has also increased because we are doing millions and millions of times more of that activity. “
However, TI has proven its benefits in the Covid-19 crisis at a time when an economic slowdown has limited carbon emissions from other sectors, he said. “It’s great to see in those conditions that IT has allowed us to live better than we could, without increasing our carbon footprint,” he said. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020
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