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.
“I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative environmental impact that digital data might have,” he said. “And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually, it’s a whole lot more complex. But absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact.”
I think we all could use a picture of Tim Walz holding a piglet.
— Mollie Katzen (@MollieKatzen) August 6, 2024
De nada. pic.twitter.com/RR4Q9yYPhB
He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and estimates that personal data tells the same story.
Hodgkinson said: “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.”
One funny meme isn’t going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored, unused, in people’s camera rolls does have an impact, he explained: “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.”
Cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to stop people from deleting junk data, as the more data that is stored, the more people pay to use their systems.
Hodgkinson said: “We’re paying for that storage. Now effectively, you’re paying for something which you’re not ever going to use again, because you’re not even aware it exists. And when we think about the significant costs it has for financial terms, but also the environment, to the bigger picture … we’re falling short of the required trajectory to meet that zero by 2050.
“There are maybe other big contributors to [greenhouse gas] emissions, which maybe haven’t been picked up. And we would certainly argue that data is one of those and it will grow and get bigger, particularly think about that huge explosion but also, we know through forecasts that in the next year to two, if we take all the renewable energy in the world, that wouldn’t be enough to accommodate the amount of energy data requires. So that’s quite a scary thought.”
One thing people can do to stop the data juggernaut, he said, is to send fewer pointless emails: “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.”
Steps we can take to reduce our carbon footprint include avoiding the “dreaded ‘reply all’ button”, Hodgkinson added. “If we think that our email or the data we produce is carbon neutral, we will never ask the question of ourselves, in terms of: ‘If I do X, what’s the consequence?’ And so when we think about the likes of different analytics, we think about things like ChatGPT, for instance. Again, for many individuals, they believe that to be carbon neutral, but it isn’t. So asking ourselves those questions which we’ve never really asked before within organisations and individuals can make such a big difference for behavioural change.”
