'You're paying for something you'll never use again'
A new study has found that the over-sharing of memes, photos and 'reply all' emails online is bad for the climate. When internet memes first captured our imaginations, hardly anyone was worried about how much energy they were using. But now experts are worried.
Photo: Pixabay.com.
Researchers have found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data,” meaning it’s used once and then never accessed again. That means, The Guardian reports, that all the memes, jokes, and movies we love to share with friends and family are sitting out there in a data center, wasting energy.
National Grid predicts that data centres will account for just under 6% of the UK's total electricity consumption by 2030, so tackling unwanted data is a vital part of tackling the climate crisis.
Professor Ian Hodgkinson from Loughborough University studies the impact of 'dark data' on the climate and how to reduce it.
“I actually started a couple of years ago trying to understand the negative impact of digital data on the environment,” he says. “It might seem like a simple question to answer, but it turns out it’s much more complicated. But there’s no question that data has a negative impact on the environment.”
He found that 68% of the data used by companies is never used again, and he believes that personal data tells a similar story.
Hodgkinson notes that if you look at individuals and society as a whole, many people still think that data is carbon neutral, but every piece of data, whether it's an image, a social media post, whatever it is, has a carbon footprint.
«So,» he concludes, «when we store data in the cloud, we think of a white fluffy cloud, but the reality is that these data centres are incredibly hot, incredibly noisy, they use a lot of energy.»
Of course, one funny meme won't destroy the planet, but the millions of unused photos stored on people's cameras do have an impact, Hodgkinson explained: «One photo isn't going to have a dramatic impact. But of course, if you went into your own phone and looked at all the old photos you've got, it would have quite an impact in terms of energy consumption.»
Cloud providers and tech companies have a financial incentive to stop users from deleting unnecessary data, because the more data is stored, the more people pay to use their systems, The Guardian reports.
“You’re essentially paying for something you’re never going to use again because you don’t even know it’s there,” Hodgkinson says. “And if we think about the significant financial costs that this entails, as well as the environmental costs, the bigger picture is that we’re not on track to get to net zero by 2050.”
It's possible, he says, that there are other major factors contributing to greenhouse gas emissions that may not yet have been identified: «And we could certainly argue that data is one of them, and it will grow and become more and more, especially when we think about this huge explosion, but we also know from projections that in the next year or two, if we use all the renewable energy sources in the world, it will not be enough to meet the amount of energy data required. So it's a pretty scary thought.”
According to Hodgkinson, one of the things people can do to stop the flow of data is to send fewer meaningless emails: for every standard email there is about 4g carbon. “If we then think about the amount of what we basically call 'legacy data' that we have stored, for example, if we think about all the digital photographs we have, we get a cumulative effect.»
Steps we can take to reduce our carbon footprint include doing away with the «dreaded 'send to all' button,» Hodgkinson added.