Guilty…

Posted on by Live & Learn

One evening in the spring of 2015, I filmed a 15-second video out the window of an Amtrak train as it rattled across the barren flatlands of southern New Jersey. There’s nothing artful or interesting about the clip. All you see is a slanted rush of white and yellow lights. I can’t remember why I made it. Until a few days ago, I had never even watched it. And yet for the past nine years, that video has been sitting on a server in a data center somewhere, silently and invisibly taking a very small toll on our planet…

Data centers and data-transmission networks now account for as much as 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption…

With other forms of consumption that are bad for the planet, we all understand that the main burden of responsibility falls on the big players—industry, government, the rich and powerful. But we also acknowledge that everyone else has a part to play too. I stop running the water while I’m brushing my teeth. I carry groceries in a burlap tote. I turn off the lights whenever I step out of my apartment, regardless of whether I’m leaving for five minutes or a week…

Every time we make a new video or send an email, or post a photo of our latest meal, it’s like turning on a small light bulb that’ll never be turned off…We’ve got to think about whether it’s really bad to carry on with our current digital practices.”In other words: To help save the planet, should we be using less data? Given how much of modern life depends on megabytes and teraflops, the answer could be a key facet to living nobly in the AI age…

By my estimate, following a formula included in a recent research paper, storing my train video has created about 100 grams of CO2 over the past decade. At first blush, this is effectively nothing: less than one three-100ths of a percent of the yearly CO2 emissions from a pet cat. But data slough off us like skin cells. Last year, I sent 960 videos to the cloud. Because phones record videos in much higher quality these days, most of these clips are larger than that 15-second video from 2015. And like many other people, I have a sprawling digital footprint; many of my stored videos have been either sent to or received from at least one other person who is also storing them on one or two cloud platforms…

We just need to start to think around the impact of every button we press ‘Send’ or ‘Upload’ on,” Jackson told me. As a first step, he suggests going back through your phone and computer and getting rid of all the data that you’ll never use again. (The industry term for such detritus is dark data; much of Jackson’s research focuses on teaching companies to reuse old information instead of making new bytes.) That’s easier said than done. When I was looking through old videos for this story, I found many clips that sparked cherished memories. None of these videos was particularly fascinating. But a data center had conserved the data for so long that watching them now transported me, joyfully, to a simpler time. Deciding whether to scrap any of these is not the same as deciding whether to turn a light bulb off when you step out of a room. “The light bulb, you can just come back and switch it back on,” Jackson admitted. “Once you’ve gotten rid of data, it’s gone.” Even my feelings about the train video—which did not spark any fond memories—remain unresolved. For now, it’s still up there…

In a report published in 2021, Berners-Lee and a team of researchers found that if the information-and-communications sector is going to match the reductions necessary to keep global warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, it will have to cut its carbon emissions by 42 percent by the end of this decade, and 72 percent by the end of the next…’

More fundamentally, maybe we don’t need to turn everything into data. If I put down my phone the next time I’m on a train, it won’t save the planet. But I’ll be looking out the window with my own eyes, creating a memory that emits no carbon at all.

— Arthur Holland Michel, from “Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever.” (The Atlantic, July 5, 2024)

42 thoughts on “Guilty…”

  1. There’s a restaurant near me is having a data free Mondays – free oysters or clams for anyone who will put their phone or personal device in a pot by the reception desk. It’s apparently a huge success…I think we rarely consider our carbon footprint, the data we keep, the hours we keep them…I think expediency can dumb us down, and honestly, keeping one’s eyes open and engaging with the world without phones, iPads etc, may offer a route for increasing our knowledge of each other and ourselves.

  5. Sorry, that I am delayed in commenting…. I was having breakfast, looking at your morning post on Instagram (beautiful pics btw) which then took me to your Facebook…. Then a tumblr notification hit, and it was 3:30!

    What’s this about a light bulb being out? Need help fixing it?

    Smiling.

    Happy Weekend DK! Thank you for the LIGHT you bring to each of us.

  6. So interesting, these things we never think about (or at least for very long). Out of sight, out of mind is our mantra in so many ways…the data we store, the water we use (and waste), the trees we kill, and on and on. This post both fascinates and distresses me. There are many benefits to our digital world (says the woman sheepishly while sitting by the pool and watching a movie on her iPad), but dear Lord, the costs….

  7. I wouldn’t have any issue with putting my phone in the pot, since I don’t do social media and Clams, oh yes…my cell has been off for over a week. I try to check it every week, but alas most of the time I don’t even know where it is. I do unearth the cell when my sweet hubby drops me at the doctor’s office…I have a small zipper pouch (life without a purse is nice) that I put the cell in & a very small wallet (which my old cell could fit it in , alas they made us upgrade phone <<<ugh) When I need to be picked up I call him & the handsome prince arrives in the automobile within 6 min. Once in awhile the dear daughter will call the dad’s cell if she doesn’t get an answer on the house phone…to take a photo I use an old pocket camera with an SD card…Hubby & I like the slow life…I think I will have to download & use my 1st app after I get a continuous glucose monitor. /// Arthur Holland Michel, from what you share didn’t mention the huge amount of clean WATER that the Data centers USE for their cooling of equipment and data-transmission networks I bet suck a lot energy & perhaps water, too. I do use a laptop though some days (sometimes 3 in a row) it says off…it is good to rest one’s eyes from blue screens & when you do use the computer or cells it is great to look away to a vista at least 20 feet away for at least 15 seconds. /// I do think that Arthur Holland Michel’s message of being more Mindful is Warranted…We try to be more Mindful, daily… Thanks for reminding me/us that we should all become aware of the footprint we leave…

  8. Dave, I know you have lots of gadgets and if not for you, all of us wouldn’t have the opportunity to be delighted each time you, post..The beauty you capture, with your photos, descriptive writings and the art you’ve shared along with the authors & poets writings are Wonderful 🙂 /// We just choose to email, visit or call (land line) than use the cells. I like having choices…

  9. (Apologies in advance for errors in grammar or typing of this comment. I re-wrote it a couple of times and after two hours I am burned out.)

    —-

    I get the concept here, and I’m totally in favor of reducing carbon footprint wherever possible (obviously).

    BUT… I HAVE TO WAVE A BIG YELLOW CAUTION FLAG WHEN IT COMES TO TRYING TO COMPARE “DIGITAL CARBON FOOTPRINT VERSUS ANALOG”. CAN THIS ACTUALLY BE MEASURED? I’M SKEPTICAL BECAUSE OF THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM.

    Running computers requires a massive amount of electricity… Of course. But the amount of electricity required to store say, a gigabyte of data is reduced by orders of magnitude every few years as computer chips get smaller and smaller and require less and less electricity to run. The data stored on your smart phone used to take up acres of disc drives connected to mainframe computers in the 1960s and 70s. And those acres of computers were not powered by a tiny rechargeable battery. Power required will continue to reduce by orders of magnitude.

    I can’t even scratch the surface of trying to calculate resources required to live in an analog world versus a digital world. (Ironically, I suspect you would need computers to do those calculations, and I bet you could never get correct answers. The problem is too complicated.)

    —–

    Let me note a few of the obvious basic resources SAVED by converting to digital:

    – Countless trees saved by not needing paper.
    – (How about avoidance of filing cabinets and buildings needed to store that paper?)
    – Chemicals (toxic?)… (ink on the paper, and chemicals required to develop and print photographs.) (How many photos do you have that you never bother to print these days? Seeing them on the screen is enough. No chemicals required.)
    – Plastic no longer needed for photo or video negatives.

    – Another note regarding electricity savings: if you turn off the devices you own personally in your home, you save electricity. No doubt about that. (There was always electricity constantly needed to run your old telephone that was plugged into the wall by the way.)

    If you stop using cloud storage… this is an interesting question. How many millions (or billions, or trillions) of videos can be held on a single cloud server? If you delete half the data on a server, you still have to keep that server running. There are just a lot more zeros being stored than ones…No power saved.

    And do we take tons more photos and videos now? Of course. But consider the amount of knowledge we have gained by being able to take countless more photos (of outer space for example). What have we learned from those photos used for scientific research? What is that knowledge worth? How many lives have been saved (violence avoided) because of digital photos taken from our spy satellites?

    Good luck calculating the carbon footprint when you consider the few examples I have given above, plus heaven knows how many more variables are involved.

    (and I would argue that sometimes a larger carbon footprint is worth it, for things like knowledge, safety, and security.)

  11. Wow. This household reduces, reuses, recycles and conserves somewhat well, but I have never considered our seemingly non-carbon electronic footprint. This is the year I planned to sort through, print and purge almost endless photos on my Android cell, on Facebook, on my wondrous non-functional 3G Tracfone, and on a very storage-friendly desktop. I’ll be wondering, though — do deleted things really go away? Gosh, I hope so, but I’ll be more careful, now, about overusing data.

      1. I have numerous favorited sites and many bookmarked pages, and I rarely log out of anywhere except when clearing cache..not to mention teen grandson is subscribed to 40,000 YouTube and other feeds, and all my kids have cloud storage — all of this stuff is always “On”?? Good heavens, this is sobering food for thought, DK. Thank you!

  12. I had the problem only about 3 wks ago that in one night, all my interconnected systems (phone, ipad, laptop) deleted some 6500 photos and videos I still had the day before. No warning, no nothing whatsoever, never to be found again. I don‘t even use cloud services, because I know about all these problems mentioned in the article. Then I got another online warning: You have over-used your GB storage by 15% and you won‘t be able to send mails, get stuff, things will be deleted randomly – and now I was fully awake. Over 2 days I deleted stuff I didn‘t know I even still had from the beginnings of gmail etc….. Now I‘m back to ‚over 75% use of my storage capacities‘ and I must admit that I doubt that any of the zillions docs, photos, vids and more I deleted forever, will be missed.
    Since the water shortage a few years ago I try to be very aware of how I use water. Turning off the supply while soaping hands, using the left over water from tea etc. for rinsing and much more. HH doesn‘t believe in it which drives me nuts but I howl in vain.
    A read- and think-worthy article. We try also to switch off the wifi at night and not let umpteen lamps on burning electricity when we‘re out. I do however draw the line at my little light chains with tiny LEDs; the do much good for my well-being!

  13. When I’m in DC for work, I stay with family not too far from Dulles Airport. I noticed massive structures that can’t have offices in them. No windows, lots of concrete. Where my relatives live is very beautiful, great developments. What separates a cluster of nature from the next is lots of these concrete structures. I was told they’re all data centers. I’m such an end user. I know nothing about how computers or phones work and what it takes. Environment is still better off, but this read is excellent to put things in perspective.
    Now I know what a data center here. Hardly any around here. But all over around Washington DC.

    1. Sawsan, HH had once a boss living in Dulles. He was there twice I think. He was never colder in his life and if I remember correctly, his flight was cancelled due to bad weather. When he asked his then friend why he would live in such a cold climate, he said: It‘s cheap, I can have a great house (he did!) and ppl leave me alone….
      He also mentioned those buildings with no windows. He knew what they were. Not ‚an invite‘ to move there, for sure, but obviously there is a great need for ever more ‚data space‘.

      1. It’s not cheap. It’s considerably cheaper but there’s no house less the 1 million.
        Chicago is way colder than DC.
        I have no desire to leave Chicago

        1. HH had family in Chicago. Very cold too…. Now, they‘re all gone, his uncle‘s widow to Arizona (to her daughter), the two boys with their families somewhere or other. They are a family of ‚wanderers‘

  14. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood: If we ALL do our part and delete UNNEEDED data, our combined efforts will result in a good thing: a reduction in use of electricity (a.k.a. a reduction in the global carbon footprint).

    Now when it comes to measuring that positive impact accurately given all the variables involved… I don’t think it’s even worth bothering to try. Let’s take the human brain power and computer power (electricity) that would be used in attempting to do such a measurement… and put it to better use elsewhere… like doing research on a cure for cancer for example.

    1. Paul, as you can see from my comment further up, I certainly did MY part of ridding the overwhelming ‚cloud‘ (data centers) by having wiped clean my slate of ‚remembrance‘, but sadly I also doubt that your suggestion will work. I know that lots of my ‚good ideas‘ will never work because everybody would have to do their bit and that just won‘t happen…. but I admire your efforts to put the world right. We need lots of ppl like you. Thank you (and tks to Dave for lending the space for these exchanges).

      1. Totally agree with you here Kiki.
        People will not clean up their data.
        A high percentage of people will not even think of the issue, and also a high percentage of people will not put in the effort required.

        I admire you for doing your part! 🙂

        I personally do not store my data in the cloud (with the exception of things that I cannot control, like my email, and social media posts (try to avoid those, with a few exceptions… One being THIS fantastic blog!)

        I’m still old-school when it comes to storing files that I create myself (photos etc.). They are sitting on (powered down) hard drives in my house. Of course if my house burns down…”I am toast” (pun intended) 🙂

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