Does global warming mean anything to you? Would you say that you can feel the consequences of global warming in your everyday life? Well, NASA knows. NASA has been collecting global weather data from 1884 to 2015, and you can see here, how temperatures are changing over time.
That being said, we have to realize that the pollutant is not always the one we believe is.
Let’s take, for example, sending of a simple mail. It may seem silly but it takes as much energy as letting a 24-watts lamp turned on for 1 hour. Let's multiply this by 10 000 000 000, that is to say, the number of emails that are sent every hour in the world, and you reach the equivalent of 15 nuclear power plants running at full capacity.
Sounds crazy right?
And that’s not all: because all the emails that you keep in your mailbox, which can reach sometimes the number of thousands, actually keep polluting..
How? Let me explain.
Can you guess what this is?
Those are the Appalachian Mountains in the US.
Let's go see them a little closer by entering these coordinates on Google Earth (you will need Google Chrome) 37°54'50"N 81°32'07"W.
All the white spots that you can see in the mountains are open-pit coal mines.
Why open? Because underground coal mines don’t bring enough money. The principle of these mines is to shave the forests, to blast the mountains and extract all the coal it contains.
By doing this, we remove the top of the mountain, we bury the rivers and because of the toxic products contained in the explosives, we make the soil completely sterile. Absolutely nothing can grow back, not even with a ton of fertilizer. This radical practice is called “mountaintop removal mining” (also called MTM).
But what can justify such a practice? And why do we need that much coal nowadays?
Data Centers
Coal is an essential component of our electronic devices. We can find it in phones, batteries, solar panels, computer, cables, etc.
Activities such as reading your emails, listening to music, or reading this post actually contribute to global warming..
So let’s see what is happening when you send that email.
Where does your email go?
Since you send information that goes thousands of miles away, the computer transfers it to your internet box, and then sends it to a connection centre, which is usually at the first floor of your building. This connection centre sends the information through cables that will begin to furrow the world, go under the ocean until reaching the data centre where your mail is processed and stored. But what is a data centre?
These are huge hard drives that work 24/7 to make sure any data is accessible anytime. But then, where is the problem? In case you haven’t noticed yet when used, your computer produces heat. Now imagine a huge hangar with thousands and thousands of computers working 24/7...
And this represents apparently 40% of the budget of nuclear plants, just for cooling the computers. And for your information, a day of consumption of a data centre is equivalent to that of 30,000 people over the same period.
And with the exponential increase of data on the internet, uploading more videos etc, new data centres must be built constantly, and that's exactly where the problem is with MTM.
Deforestation without the possibility of effective reforestation, toxic gas fume favoring global warming, contamination of the water we drink by heavy metals, coal mining negative health effects on the miners (cancer, cardiovascular diseases), destruction of rivers, destruction of the ecosystem and the natural habitat of animals, that’s not what we want.
You NEED to watch this TedxTalk video from Michael Hendryx, a Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at School of Public Health in Indiana USA, talking about his studies on the dangers of coal mines for humans and how lobbies are trying to hide the problem.
The more data you have on the internet, the more data centres there will be, and therefore the more energy used to maintain data. And the best way to reduce this amount of data is to sort. Why not just start with our mailbox? Well, that is what offers few apps such as CLEANFOX, you just have to simply install their app, or go to their website, and in a few clicks they will clean up your mailbox of undesirable elements only selecting spam, advertising, and newsletters that can flow constantly.
This is a cool tool to reduce our carbon footprint!
If you want to know more about data centers, MTM and few solutions towards digital pollutions:
- “CO2 Emissions from fuel combustion” by the International Energy Agency.
- A Greenpeace study “How clean is your cloud”.
- “France 24 English: Environment – Digital pollution, Data centers, planned obsolescence, recycling materials".
- TED - Allan Savory: How to turn our deserts into grasslands and reverse climate change.
- CGTN America: New technology in China turns desert into land rich with crops.
Hope you enjoyed,
Noémie.
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