You couldn’t make this stuff up even if you tried.

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.

Hodgkinson claims that dark data—the information that is accessed only a couple of times and then indefinitely stored in a data warehouse—is harming the environment.

“If we think about individuals and society more broadly, what we found is that many still assume that data is carbon neutral, but every piece of data whether it be an image, whether it be an Instagram post, whatever it is, there’s a carbon footprint attached to it.

“So when we’re storing things in the cloud, we think about the white fluffy cloud, but the reality is, these datacentres are incredibly hot, incredibly noisy, they consume a large amount of energy.”

…“The one picture isn’t going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption.”

The million dollar question is: how much energy is he talking about (emphasis mine)?

…“One [figure] that often does the rounds is that for every standard email, that equates to about 4g of carbon. If we then think about the amount of what we mainly call ‘legacy data’ that we hold, so if we think about all the digital photos that we have, for instance, there will be a cumulative impact.”

Similar points like this have been made before and, according to Hodgkinson’s logic, it costs more to store an email or meme than to send it out. So he’s essentially saying that people should only communicate by phone or writing a physical letter. Essentially, communication must be shut down to save the planet.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay