3 ms·

Reminds me of the Mastodon accounts that admonish people about the environmental impact of saving family photos to your hard drive.

• darkwater 2y ago
  Would you mind sharing?
  • gradientsrneat 2y ago
    Can't find the posts, but the gists were that they were admonishing people against saving an excessive number of photos to their phones/computers. To be charitable to their arguments, the digital storage is not free ecologically; there are costs to producing the storage hardware, as well as electricity needed to transport and store them, as well as cloud storage and web interactivity. But I think their argument focused purely on the electricity aspect on the act of saving the file. Several Mastodon users in the same social sphere, who had a tech background, later posted their own takes, enumerating the actual electricity cost of committing a photo to a hard drive, which was quite miniscule (I don't recall, but it was orders of magnitude below the base functions of a computer). It is, I would say, a general trend of people who do not critically inspect the ideas they choose to promote, even though their intentions may be good.
    • jl6 2y ago
      A variant of this idea is circulating in the corporate world: the CO2 emissions of an email. A lot of people now seem to think that hitting send in Outlook causes a little puff of gas to be emitted somewhere. Their solution is to send their message via Teams instead. Have they analyzed the CO2 emissions of a Teams message? Of course not.