Saving the planet, one email at a time
Save the world, in 4-gram increments
“Send fewer pointless emails” to save the planet. That’s The Guardian’s latest suggestion for combating the climate crisis.
Apparently, each email uses around 4 grams of carbon, although many people envision digital communication as something that is intangible. According to Ian Hodgkinson, professor of “strategy” at Loughborough University in the UK, one way to reduce our carbon footprints is therefore avoiding the “dreaded ‘reply all’ button.”
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?”
Deadly data
Worse still, The Guardian continues, the majority of data that gets stored in the cloud is so-called “dark data.” Dark data is like disposable dishes — use once and discard. Only things aren’t being discarded — instead, they are often automatically stored in massive data centers which are powered using an incredible amount of energy.
That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family ... are out there somewhere, sitting in a data center, using up energy...
As Hodgkinson puts it,
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...
... absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact.
Google and Me
Since the owners of the data centers are biased against saving the climate, given that people pay them to store all their old pictures and other such junk, it’s left to “organizations and individuals” to make a “big difference for behavioral change,” Hodgkinson concludes. His advice (other than ending reply-all emails)?
... if you may be go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption.
Hodgkinson doesn’t break down data usage into categories, which is unfortunate considering that while data usage and storage as a whole does use a lot of energy, most of that energy is used by the big tech companies, making the impact of deleting even hundreds of emails pale in comparison. It’s much like switching to using reusable drinking straws to “save the world,” while countries like China and India are building new power plants every other day.
The following chart shows just how much impact on energy usage companies like Google and Microsoft have (with Meta and Apple trailing a little behind).
Last year, Google and Microsoft both used 24 TWh, not much less than Ireland, a country of just over 5 million people. Meta used half of that amount but is on an upward trend, as is Apple. And there’s no sign that Google and Microsoft intend to stop where they are. In the past 5 years, Google’s energy usage more than doubled; Microsoft’s energy usage doubled over just 3 years, between 2020 and 2023.
Literally breaking the internet
Much of the energy these giant companies use is devoted to training artificial intelligence (AI) models. In May of last year, the Internet Archive actually crashed due to what is thought to have been a massive data training “raid” on its resources. Its server was overloaded with requests and broke down entirely for several hours, as the site’s blog recorded:
What just happened on archive.org today, as best we know:
Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services. (Even by web standards, 10’s of thousands of requests per second is a lot.)
This activity brought archive.org down for all users for about an hour.
We are thankful to our engineers who could scramble on a Sunday afternoon on a holiday weekend to work on this.
We got the service back up by blocking those IP addresses. But, another 64 addresses started the same type of activity a couple of hours later. We figured out how to block this new set, but again, with about an hour outage.
590 million visits to ChatGPT in a single month
No one denies the incredible amount of power used to fuel AI, but many, including climate crusaders, justify it. One example is the billion-dollar Bosch company which describes how much energy it takes to utilize popular AI sites such as ChatGPT:
What are potential environmental impacts of generative AI?
One of the most significant potential environmental impacts is the energy consumption of generative AI. It requires enormous computational power to process the large amount of data, which is needed to generate new information. In January 2023, ChatGPT had roughly 590 million visits. With approximately 5 questions per user, this amounted to the same energy consumption as 175,000 people consume in the same period of time.
Behind the scenes, however, AI resources such as ChatGPT use lots more energy to build their platforms and maintain them:
While this enormous figure only takes into account the electricity of the actual usage, another couple of thousands of megawatts have been used to train ChatGPT. The development of ever more powerful components needed to generate content increases electricity consumption significantly. To date, this electricity is still mainly generated from non-renewable energies. Hence, generative AI is right now contributing to climate change and enhancing environmental damage.
But the massive carbon data bill is worth it — if you’re Big Tech
Is it worth it (for those worried about carbon footprints)? Bosch insists that it is:
Generative AI can actually help reduce the consumption of natural resources by making processes leaner and by minimizing waste. For instance, generative AI algorithms can be used to optimize buildings, infrastructure, and the design of products. AI can also support in reducing the amount of material needed. On the next level, significant reductions in raw material consumption and energy usage can be achieved.
Furthermore, generative AI can be used to optimize the use of resources such as water and energy in manufacturing and production processes. By analyzing data and identifying areas where resources are used inefficiently, the algorithms can suggest concrete changes to improve efficiency and reduce waste.
Bosch may be slightly biased itself, of course, given that it is heavily investing in AI at its Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence. But only with the noblest of intentions:
Our goal is to create AI-based solutions that increase efficiency at Bosch plants, optimize supply chains, improve quality of Bosch products, and reduce costs.
‘Net Zero is the First Commandment; Greenwashing is the unpardonable sin’
In case anyone still needed reassuring, Bosch stresses its climate credentials, writing that,
As a pioneer in the industry, Bosch and its more than 400 locations have been CO2 neutral since 2020. Do you also want to achieve this magical step?
Bosch isn’t the only company that is eager to present itself as carbon-neutral. As news site Mercator notes, other companies are also desperate to avoid falling foul of the new climate religion in which “Net Zero is the First Commandment.” So much so that they have tripped and ended up committing the “unpardonable sin” — greenwashing - portraying a product as "green" and environmentally friendly when it is not.
Do people still look for “not tested on animals” when buying cosmetics and self-care products these days, or is “carbon neutral” now a satisfactory substitute? Research has shown that consumers are actually prepared to pay more, even up to 30 percent more, for a product with a label telling them that it has “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions,” and that “sustainability is an important consideration when purchasing food and beverages in a grocery store or restaurant.” But are the claims true?
How dare you!
These facts came to light in an ongoing court case, New York v. JBS USA Food Company and JBS USAFood Holdings. NY Attorney General Letitia James, in a press release on the case, told reporters that,
When companies falsely advertise their commitment to sustainability, they are misleading consumers and endangering our planet.
What has JBS done wrong?
JBS is the world’s biggest meat producer, and conducts business in over 20 countries with annual revenues of over $70 billion. It has claimed to be committed to achieving Net Zero by 2040 but is being sued because it has “no viable plan to meet its commitment”:
Across its marketing materials, the JBS Group has made sweeping representations to consumers about its commitment to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, claiming that it will be “Net Zero by 2040.”
The JBS Group, however, has had no viable plan to meet its commitment to be “Net Zero by 2040.”
As a side note, the court filing admits that JBS actually has no feasible path to achieving Net Zero by 2040 or any other date in the near future, because,
... there are no proven agricultural practices to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero at the JBS Group’s current scale, and offsetting those emissions would be a costly undertaking of an unprecedented degree.
Letitia James now wants to see JBS punished with civil penalties, in order to save the planet, of course. But then, JBS produces meat, not data, and who needs meat?
