Deleting pointless data in the cloud can help cut emissions

Here's one for you: delete your email chains - at work and at home. Your notes from dreary meetings five years ago. Your duplicate photos. And all those random documents you haven't needed for years and never will again, but that you keep stored in 'The Cloud' because - well, it's a cloud, right? Fluffy, ethereal and made of nothing but immaterial digits.

Not exactly.

Those photos, emails and notes of your tax liabiilities for 1982 have a more sinister name: Dark Data.

It turns out that more than half the data generated by business is only meant to be used once, but is stored indefinitely in data centres that are sucking up the energy we need for other things. The Financial Times reported a month ago that a defence company in Norway, wanting to increase capacity for weapons for Ukraine, was told there was no more power because it was all needed for TikTok.

Sheila Hayman is concerned about the amount of data being stored in The Cloud (Image: Sheila Hayman)

We've all been nagged about emissions from cars and flying, but even in 2020, digital data accounted for about 4% of global emissions - and over half of that is storage in data centres.

Globally, 1.3 billion gigs of dark data are produced - the equivalent of over 3 million transatlantic flights - every day.

And the more we digitise, the more power hungry our devices become. In this context, 'Smart' is another interesting piece of linguistic prestidigitation. How do your toothbrush, toaster, baby alarm, doorbell and 'driver assisted' car become 'smart'? By sending a constant stream of data back to those servers, in data centres that may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. If your 'smart' home could speak, it would be deafening. 'She's awake! She asked me to play the Breakfast Show! She wants to know the weather forecast for today. No, for tomorrow! Fridge is open! Fridge is closed'!

And all of that inane chat - all of it - will be stored, because the manufacturers don't know which bits of data will be useful for training - and because, as things stand, they don't care enough to delete the rest.

In that context, 'Smart' begins to sound a little less accurate. So next time your brain is too fried to do any actual work, or your beloved is running late, do the planet a favour - and hit 'delete'.

Sheila Hayman is a member of Climate Emergency Camden (CEC) climateemergencycamden.org.