Pirate's Cove

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Climate change: Can sending fewer emails really save the planet?

Are you the type of person who always says thank-you? Well, if it’s by email, you should stop, according to UK officials looking at ways to save the environment.

The Financial Times reports that we may all soon be encouraged to send one fewer email a day, cutting out “useless” one-line messages – such as “thanks”.

Doing so “would save a lot of carbon”, one official involved in next year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow said.

But would it really make a huge difference?

The Financial Times report says the officials promoting this idea referred to a press release from renewable electricity firm Ovo Energy from one year ago.

It claimed that if every British person sent one fewer thank-you email a day, it would save 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of flights to Europe.

The problem, however, is that even if the sums involved roughly worked out, it would still be a splash in the pond.

The UK’s annual greenhouse gas emissions were 435.2 million tonnes in 2019 – so the amount in question here is about 0.0037% of the national picture. And that’s if every single British person reduced their email output.

Yeah, but, see, what if we all also didn’t send the email that precipitated the thank you? And didn’t send a “you’re quite welcome, my pleasure” one? What if all the news outlets stopped sending emails to coordinate all their climate messaging?

“The reality is that a lot of the system will still have impact, whether or not the email is sent,” Prof Preist explains.

“Your laptop will still be on, your wi-fi will still be on, your home internet connection will still be on, the wider network will still use roughly the same amount of energy even with a reduction in volume.

Next up, they’ll restrict the amount of time your laptop, desktop, smartphone, and tablet can be on and connected to the WiFi, and a way to put your router into standby when not in use.

Rather than worrying about relatively low-impact emails, some researchers suggest we should turn our attention to services such as game and video-streaming and cloud storage which have a much larger effect.

But the topic is immensely complicated, and there is a debate about how estimates should be calculated – and who should be responsible for it.

Well, good luck with that one. You’ve lost most Millennials and GenZ, and a goodly chunk of GenX, who were really the big ones doing that stuff. Have fun with your cult.

Oh, and what’s the carbon footprint of all these climate crisis (scam) articles from climate cult outlets?