As this morning's Politico email briefing notes:
British officials fighting climate change reckon that if each person in the U.K. sent one fewer email a day it would cut carbon emissions by 16,000 tons a year – the equivalent of 80,000 people flying from London to Madrid. Apparently Brits generate vast emissions by sending 64 million unnecessary emails each day, saying things like “thank you,” “appreciated,” “cheers” and “lol.” The FT's George Parker has the story.
So let me call out what is happening here. This is deliberate misinformation. It is part of an anti-environmentalism campaign.
The aim is threefold. First it wants to trivialise the issue.
Second, it wants consumers to be blamed. The message is that it is not the industrial complex that gives us no choice but consume carbon that is to blame for the mess that we are in. It's all our fault.
And third, it permits token gesture responses that have inconsequential impact to the problem, whilst leaving the profit generating destruction of the planet intact and ongoing.
Saying which, I am not saying that the choices that we make have no consequences. Obviously they do. But reducing flights to Madrid remains more important than cutting emails. And household insulation and overall energy use is vastly more important still. As is transport reform.
But to infantilise the issue with deliberately placed comments like this is part of a plan to to belittle it. And that's not happening by chance. That is the consequence of having a government that does not believe that this is an issue.
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Emails!
Nothing about bitcoin; that consumes more power than all of Switzerland!
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/4/20682109/bitcoin-energy-consumption-annual-calculation-cambridge-index-cbeci-country-comparison
Surely its being destroyed by the ego’s of planet savers?
You appear to be here to troll
Thus us your first warning that this is not the way this site works
Play elsewhere if that is your game
I cycle around a lot and I can tell you that emails are not responsible for the palpable taste of diesel and petrol fumes I am breathing in when I am on my bike.
The claim is bullshit – aimed at making us feel better, make it seem easier to avoid having to take more stringent action. So I agree with you.
Whilst working from home, email use has gone up – and understandably so. Who are they kidding?
No one but their own bullshitting selves
Yep and the biggest polluters on the roads are the huge numbers of SUV’s, they really are an assault on the planet. Edinburgh is awash with them, especially since Covid and the second home owners moved in F/T. One thing is for sure, the rich are the biggest polluters too, they tend to have bigger houses and bigger cars etc.
I can never understand the powerful who are hell bent on destroying planet Earth, ( for money!) do they not have children or grandchildren? Do they have another planet to go to?
Rachel Carson and Carl Sagan both warned about climate change due to human ignorance, greed and stupidity, their words have pretty been ignored ever since.
Unfortunately the rich and powerful are in control, and it’s looking pretty bad for the planet, flora and fauna.
The comment about pets and CO2, that’s a concern, but people could reduce their own CO2 output to balance that out. I don’t eat meat or fish, and don’t drive, but my cat does, (well he doesn’t drive lol!) maybe that slightly makes up for his carbon ‘pawprint’.
It’s a luxury I know to buy as much organic and small farms dairy produce as poss and affordable. Many just cannot afford that though I was once in a shop and a mother said to her son ‘put that back it’s organic!’ It maybe cost 10p more…
Reduce, reuse, recycle should be in everyone’s daily vocabulary. Sadly tech is a big problem due to the minerals being used thereby wrecking the environment, that should have been sorted out years ago! We have a long way to go, the Tories have no intention of doing anything that does not benefit them financially, whatever colour they call it, green, blue, yellow deal, makes no difference we are truly royally scr**wed.
Thanks
These arguments of ‘if only people behaved themselves (smoked less, ate less, put masks on, sent less emails) are really persuasive. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen or heard these types of argument raised against what are clearly systemic issues. People literally believe that the rise in coronavirus cases is because individuals are not doing what they should do, rather than the government has failed (catastrophically for some) to govern on public health.
Saying that, the article does give me a way of ‘virtuously’ resisting emails and thus unburden myself of some administrative work.
They’ll be after the bloggers next Richard. Take it as a compliment
I haven’t read the report, but what’s the emission from a phone call, a ‘snail mailed’ letter, or even posting this comment? These aren’t frivolous questions – it seems life itself produces CO2 emissions. I read recently that even walking or cycling to meet one’s interlocutor in person produces a fair amount of unnecessary gas, as organic bodies burn carbohydrates to produce energy. Long distance communications are a risk.
There was a programme on Channel 4 the other day that discussed the power requirements of data storage, it amounted to 2-3% of the UKs energy needs. So compared to transport it’s negligible.
All this pointing the blame at the public is a tried and tested method from government to distract us from the major systemic changes that need to happen if we’re to avert climate catastrophe. Built in obsolescence, the drive for ever growing markets, the inherent waste of capitalism and the industrial military complex all need to go, sending emails doesn’t.
I seem to remember reading that 75 – 80% of all emails are spam, perhaps dealing with / banning them might be the way forward, or are they ‘donors’ ?
I would comment but I’ve already used up my allowance. I’ll go and plant a tree.
Do….always worthwhile
Good points Richard – arguing about email production of CO2 is exactly what you say it is. Arguing the opposite only trolling e.g. the infrastrucure already exists.
Politico could have done some research and would have discovered that the majority of emissions come from Energy – use, production & transport – 70+%; then Agriculture, Forestry & Land – 18% then Industrial Processes – 5% and finally Waste (3% presumably including emails) (OurWorldInData.org)
Or they might have read an article which suggests only government and not private enterprise, aka “the market”, can initiate the resources to combat climate change: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/19/climate-crisis-markets-economic-system.
Or they might just have paused before publishing nonsense and written a serious article about tackling the impending catastrophe.
Blaming ordinary citizens seems to be the new game.
Thanks
And agreed
Last I saw the global public internet was using around 10% of global electricity production, and rising. The individual transactions are small but in aggregate the effect is far from trivial. I expect economists understand that sort of situation. Identifying this as a serious problem is no excuse for ignoring other equally important issues, of course.
As far as emails are concerned, discarding the courtesy and usefulness of a ‘Thank you’ response (as suggested in the FT this morning) seems to me about the worst possible reaction. At a first guess we could improve their energy efficiency of emails by at least an order of magnitude simply by insisting on plain text and discarding the corporate vanity bloat of useless images, HTML formatting and pseudo-legal boilerplate. More ambitiously, dispensing with the overhead of unwanted manipulative content (including, but not limited to, commercial advertising) could massivley reduce the energy cost and improve the efficiency by which the internet transports the fraction of data which is actually signal, not noise.
Thanks
And much to agree with
I have involuntarily cut my e-mails as my provider “My.email.ie” has been down since mid day yesterday and I am feeling bereft.
The furlough has to be going into economic rents. None of it will be helping the environment, likewise for green subsidies, as follows…
My sources daily keep telling me stories like this:
“I just re-rented one of my houses. Went to the first viewer who offered 6 months up front to protect from other viewings. There were several others already lined up to take it only one day after it went on the market. Agent reckons it should have been put on 5% higher still. So the stimulus HAS to be going into land rents, not inflation of goods and services. My only complaint is agents are pretty useless at forecasting as I’ll be losing several thousand a year from this one alone”
Some numbers. Let’s say £750Bn is the stimulus total so far. UK residential real estate capitalised value is say £8Tr. So at an annual rental value of 5%(’20 years profit’) that’s a potential revenue of about 400Bn. Right in the ball park order of magnitude wise.
For those still cognitively dissonant about taxation, go figure…
With respect, total nonsense
Money for Green Deal = £12bn…. money for Space cadets = £16bn, You couldn’t make it up!
Quite
Low Tech Magazine had articles on reducing the energy demand of the internet, for example by using your default font rather than whatever the website uses.
I think you will have to go through this rather wonderful collection of articles I am afraid to find it.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
Thanks that looks great re lowtech, I will check it out. We buy reconditioned and my son invested in a ‘fairphone’…saving the planet is not cheap.
On the subject of pets, of course since Covid and lockdowns etc, many more people have homed and rehomed pets, while hopefully their own carbon footprint has reduced a bit. Our pets, as Richard says, are a great help with mental health, our cantankerous young cat has kept us sane past few months, a must for people with learning disabilities etc. Also, seeds, for veg, get them in soon, because there was a run on them in spring, that’s all good though.
Talking of Space cadets, they sound very surplus to requirements and mighty costly. Can we not just send a few of the powerful planet wrecking, war mongering people to space it might just save Earth. Tell them it’s their only chance of survival. 😉
One fewer email per day each, for Pete’s sake? As if that is going to move the needle by anything more than the tiniest fraction of a degree. Perhaps we could simply generate a slightly greater proportion of our electricity from renewables and forget about that one email.
This comes from the same thought process that indicates people (other people, of course, not the likes of our Prime Minister) should have fewer children to prevent the emissions they will inevitably produce over their lifetime, rather than addressing the economic structures that mean existence entails excessive emissions. Before someone bangs on about overpopulation, birth rates are way down and the global population will peak at around 10 billion in the next 50 years and then come down. We could all live happy, healthy lives if some people were a bit less greedy (I am looking at the US in particular, but the UK too) and global resources were spread a bit more equally.
We could made a real difference right now by addressing the half of global aviation emissions made by one in a hundred people, rather than pressing down on the other 99% and their insignificant emails. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/17/people-cause-global-aviation-emissions-study-covid-19
Agreed
Just to give a concrete example of the routine degree of waste in normal commercial traffic, take a few numbers from a bog-standard parcel tracking email I received from Royal Mail.
The actual payload of useful data is 464 bytes – that includes identification, formal greetings, tracking number and and a link to their tracking web page.
The internal overhead – address headers and so on – brings that up to 3107 bytes total. Some of that is pretty useless, but for the sake of argument assume it’s all necessary.
The actual size of that message was 71370 bytes.
That’s about 0.07% data, 3.7% more or less necessary overhead, and 95.6% utterly useless garbage. Every byte of that costs energy to transmit and process. Why waste it ?
Bob, I am entirely with you on the inefficiency of modern emails, with pointless fonts and colours and images and all the bells and whistles. I am quite happy with ASCII plain text. Not to mention the lazy habit of people including long chains of previous messages when replying. It makes me weep when (as happens several times a day) I get a one word or one line email which reach 200kb or more but the useful information is less than 1kb. Please, delete that garbage, or perhaps just pick up the telephone and speak to me as a human being? But there are much bigger fish to fry.
I’d be interested to know why you picked Madrid as an airport not to fly to. Do you have something against Latin Americans? Our colour or our culture? Madrid isn’t particularly a holiday destination. The city lacks beaches. It is however a major hub for less privileged South Americans coming to work in Europe & being able to go home to see their families once in a while. Do we offend you?
It is what the report referred to
I did not choose it
“Going by Digiconomist’s estimates, bitcoin’s annual carbon footprint is close to 16,000 kilotons of carbon dioxide. This is largely as a result of the bitcoin network being mostly fuelled by coal-fired power plants in China”
https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-track-consume-worlds-energy-2020-744036
“If such growth were to continue, this would see the network consume as much energy as the U.S. by 2019, and as much energy as the entire world by the end of 2020”
Obviously a bit off !
“60.5 spam emails x 0.3 g CO2e = 18.5 g CO2e
30.25 standard emails x 4 g CO2e = 121 g CO2e
30.25 emails with attachments x 50 g CO2e = 1512.5 g CO2e ”
“While roughly 306.4 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2020, the figure is expected to increase to over 361.6 billion daily mails in 2024”
https://carbonliteracy.com/the-carbon-cost-of-an-email/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e-mails-worldwide/