notgreen
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
E-mails not all that 'green'\During Deepavali time,
these days, we are inun-dated with electronic greet-ing cards, and we too sendseveral such e-cards our-.selves. We believe that byswitching from paper to elec-tronic mode of communica-tions, we are "green", and thatin doing so we have saved pa-per and thus done abit to savethe environment and gener-ate less C02.
Well, perhaps just a bit butit appears not as much as weare led to believe. "E-mailsare not so green" reports a
Inews item in a recent issue ofthe journal Science.
The often-quoted estimateby Mr. Matthew Yeager ofComputacentre (Europe'slargest IT infrastructurecompany) claims that send-ing an e-rnail attachment of4.7 megabytes (MB) createsas much greenhouse gas asboiling a tea-kettle 17.5times.
His study claims that an e-mail of 1 MB would be theequivalent to the emission of19 grams of C02.And if thatmail is copied (cc'd, as wetype) to 10 people, its impactis 73 grams of C02.
Well, I was astonished toread this, since I too believedthat I was saving the planet abit byusing myPC to commu-nicate with people, instead of"snail mail".
Keira Butler explains thematter in an issue of the mag-azine The Atlantic (Augustl2,2010). She says "Sayyou senda picture to 20 people byemail.
Each one has to downloadit. That means the use ofequipment such as personalcomputers, servers, storagecentres (not to mentionprinters for hard copy, ifused)". All these cost energyand hence more C02emission.
It is a matter of scale. Mat-thew Yeager points out thatthe current amount of datastorage across the globe is 1.2zettabytes (ZB) of stored da-ta. This requires equipmentwith a mass equivalent of 20per cent of the island of Man-
• hattan, New York City! Putanother way, this level of
I stored data is the equivalentof all of the US' academic li-braries multiplied by half amillion! And the data storageis expected, by the year 2020,to grow to 35 ZB (incidental-ly, zetta is a sextillion, or 10raised to the power 21 (or 1followedby 21zeros).
The scale increases thou-sand-fold each time from mil-lion or rnega, to billion (giga),trillion (tera), quadrillion(peta), quintillion (exa), sex-tillion (zetta), septillion (yot-ta) and so forth).
E-mail is thus not all thatgreen. And e-mails with at-tachments are worse. Yeager
COSTLY INFRASTRUCTURE: The use of personalcomputers, servers, storage centres cost energy andhence more C02 emission. - PHOTO: AFP
SPEAKING OF SCIENCEestimates that in a 100-peo- plus application - all lead tople company where each em- wastage in efficiency. Com-ployee sends on average 33 bine this with what Keirae-mails a day and receives 58, Butter points out in The At-the greenhouse gas emission lantic, you get an idea of howlinked to emails would be much energy is lost in elec-around 13.6,tons of C02 per tronic communications. Yes,year. e-communication does save
And a study by the French trees, is more efficient andgovernment's Environment produces less C02 than pa-and Energy Management per-based communication.Agency (Ademe) suggests But the scale of it is whatthat if each of these 100 em- needs to be kept in mind.ployees sent 10 per cent less Take Facebook usage. It isemails for a year, they would estimated that its users alonesave C02 emissions equiva- are uploading over 1000 pho-lent to one round-trip flight tos per second, or 3 billionbetween Paris and New York. photos per month. Recall the
Talking of C02 emissions tea kettle boiling equivalentby airline traffic, I was re- of sending a 4.7 MB attach-minded of what Dr. Jeremy ment, and you get the idea.Nathans of Johns Hopkins What should we do?wrote to me (bye-mail, not So what should we do?snail-mail) when we invited There are several ways of sav-him to come to Hyderabad for ing energy and cutting downdelivering the Champali- greenhouse gas from our end.maud Lecture in 2009. First, free up the memory
He declined coming in per- space in the computer. Cleanson, stating that he is doing up the e-mail box (in and outhis bit to the environment by mails) periodically. Not doingnot flying all the way from these means greater demandBaltimore and back. We had for storage and energy usedhim lecture electronically by that storage.(video talk real time; I should Second, limit the numbernow estimate how much C02 of recipients for each e-mailhe would. have saved by not (cut down the number of cc'sflyingbut video-Iecturing).· . to).
To get an estimate of how Third, cut down tlie size of-much power is consumed by the attachments (boil lesselectronic communication, tea- water).go to the website < http://Fourth:enterthe URL ad-whatsthisgottodowithstora- dress directly rather than usegefiles.wordpress.com/2010/ a search engine. Cut down the08/wired-uk-july-2009-in- times you "Google", "Yahoo"ternet-electricity.pdf >. etc.
They point out that 30 per Fifth: don't leave yourcent of the input power in computer and accessories oneach computer is used in overnight (as many officespowering the chips, 30 per do), not even on ' sleep mode'cent of the energy entering a (even if that eats up only 1-10microprocessor is turned into watts).heat, and that 123billion kilo- Sixth: laptops use 15-60watt hour (kwh) per year is watts while desktops usehow much electricity it takes 250W. Cut down the powerjust to keep the Internet's by doing more 'offline' workservers running. than online. Finally, remem-
And traditional IT environ- ber Facebooking and Twitter-ments, says Yeager, tend not ing burn carbon and maketo be overly efficient in scale. C02. Talk more and twitterTraditional infrastructure - less!server plus storage plus net- D. BALASUBRAMANIANwork plus operating system [email protected]