Does the carbon cost of email even matter? (part three)

This is the third and final part of a short series on the carbon footprint of email. So far I've looked at the likelihood that deleting email reduces your carbon footprint and at the numbers underpinning the discussion.

The final question I want to look at it is "does it matter?" The starting point for these posts was a campaign sent out from my workplace IT department encouraging us all to do things like deleting email, getting rid of old files on OneDrive and cutting down on email CCs all in the name of reducing our carbon footprints. Almost all of what they claimed just didn't stack up. But, apart from pedants like me, was it actually causing anyone any harm to receive these daft ideas?

I argue that yes, it does matter and it does potentially cause more harm than good.

Firstly, there's the waste of time element. Sorting through your old emails and deciding what to keep and what to delete takes time. That's time that you could actually be spending doing, you know, the actual job that they pay you to do. The alternative, blindly deleting everything over a certain age, runs the risk of losing some information that you actually needed. That in turn creates more work for some poor sod who has to try retrieving it from backup (assuming the IT department didn't delete those for "environmental" reasons too) or recreating it from scratch.

Secondly, it's probably counterproductive. As I pointed out in the first part of this series, data at rest on a hard drive uses virtually no electricity to keep it there. Once you start reviewing and deleting your emails and files you are creating a need for processing. And what does processing require? More electricity and more carbon emissions, the very things that you are supposed to be reducing.

Thirdly, there is the misplaced psychological feel-good factor. As responsible adults who care about the world in which we live, we want to feel that we are doing the right thing. We like to feel that we are playing a part in saving the planet when we put our waste into the recycling bin rather than the landfill. Subconsciously though we like to keep things in balance and we'll allocate some of our good deeds to offset against things we know are bad but which we want to do anyway. Who amongst us hasn't decided they "deserve" an extra biscuit because they worked hard at the gym and must have already burned off the calories? Or we'll justify to ourselves that we recycled our plastic bottles so it doesn't matter so much that we drove the car half a mile to the local shop.

Feeling that we are some how excused from making the harder choices because we've already done something "good" undermines our collective resolve to fix the harder problems.

Plastic recycling is a case in point. Although plastics are much more widely collected these days virtually none of it ends up getting recycled in the sense that most people would understand it. You might think that old plastic gets turned in to new plastic but for the most part it doesn't. Tonnes of it ends up getting incinerated (so, technically, recycled as fuel) or shipped abroad to low income countries where it becomes their problem (Greenpeace). Instead of reducing our dependence on plastic and demanding alternatives, consumers are placated by the thought that they are being responsible and recycling their waste.

Similarly, thinking that deleting emails is "good" for the environment allows us to excuse ourselves for other "bad" things like buying new electronic devices that represent many times more embedded carbon from their manufacture. And don't get me started on generative AI which burns through insane amounts of power just to churn out a simulacrum of somebody else's work.

If you are really concerned about the environmental impact of your digital life, don't try pruning your Gmail folders. Reduce the amount of e-waste in the world by making your existing devices last longer. Reduce or stop your use of Gen AI. Use your local repair cafe to prolong the lifetime of your appliances. Or learn how to repair things yourself and get a satisfying new hobby into the bargain.