Excess memes and 'reply all' emails are bad for climate, researcher warns

https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/aug/09/excess-memes-photos-and-reply-all-emails-are-bad-for-climate-finds-study

Excess memes and ‘reply all’ emails are bad for climate, researcher warns

Most data stored on power-hungry servers is used once then never looked at again

Helena Horton Environment reporter
Fri 9 Aug 2024 07.47 EDT

When “I can has cheezburger?” became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it’s unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up.

But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK’s total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.

Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced.

“I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative environmental impact that digital data might have,” he said. “And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually, it’s a whole lot more complex. But absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact.”

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