Too Much Data Causing Increase In Carbon Emissions/Global Warming

Well, well, well could it actually be the “youngins” that are creating an increase in carbon emissions these days. You know the ones who mostly lecture everyone else about Global Warming.  If you were asked who uses technology more young, middle-aged or older people I believe the answer would be the young people.

Bloomberg News is reporting that everyone needs to cut back on their consumption of technology to decrease carbon emissions into our atmosphere. Why, because so many people, especially young people, are using their digital devices to manage their lives and keep all of their photos, emails and documents on the cloud which resides in so data server farm.

I had no idea the amount of energy needed to run our technology lives.  According to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the world's data centers consumes about 2% of the entire world’s electricity and that consumption is expected to reach 8% by 2030.  To add to this problem Hewlett Packard Enterprise's research found that approximately 6% of all data ever created is in use today.  What does that mean?  That means that 94% of the world's data that is saved on a server in some data server farm is sitting in what they call a vast “cyber landfill”.

Andrew Choi, a senior research analyst at Parnassus Investments said:

It’s costing us the equivalent of maintaining the airline industry for data we don’t even use

Another bit of interesting information I found came from International Data Corp who stated that:

The sum of all the world’s data in 2018 was 33 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes), but by 2025 it could increase fivefold, to 175 zettabytes,. Every day, the world produces about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.

As Kirk Bresniker, chief architect of Hewlett Packard Labs said about all this old data that is never used:

If I want to actually do something with my data, I have to warm it up and move it through the data center

Philippe Zaouati, chief executive officer of Paris-based Mirova said that the technology sector is:

where emissions are increasingly getting out of control...We need to decrease carbon emissions, and what we see in the IT sector is increasing emissions.

Now all of you young people who take selfie after selfie and pictures of everything you do and eat may want to think about cutting back greatly on those pictures. Also, all of those texts and emails you are sending out and more than likely backed up on some server somewhere, even if you have deleted them, are killing our great planet.

Now if you truly believe in Global Warming and you believe man is the main driver behind it then stand up and be counted by either abandoning your personal technology i.e. cell phone, Ipads or greatly curtail your use of them.