triggering the server to delete your email is more energy than leaving it in storage (on a platter disk in some array in a raid)

the people who thought of that example are ignorant of how data centers work

Power off the AI farms that no one wants anyway (except the oligarchs of course)

OP hit the nail on the head. This is once again shifting the blame (and guilt) onto individuals who even collectively have fuck-all impact on the problem in question.

The worst of it is, some people will believe this shit.

Oh, I was wondering how they were going to make this our fault.

I'll say it again, because I think the idea is a practical solution to the issue: electricity and water usage should be charged at reverse volume, the more you use, the more expensive it becomes.

This would actually incentivise companies to reduce their usage, to question if they actually need that new AI data centre that will eat up all the gains in renewable electricity production and require fossil fuel plants to continue running, it'll reduce the crypto miners as well, and encourage everyone to try to reduce their usage.

The knock on effect of this is that electricity actually becomes cheaper for everyone.

The current crop of politicians (not just in the UK) is something else. They keep poking their nose at things that are not their concern and fail spectacularly at fixing things that are (health, housing, employment, education, infrastructures).

I think UK government has no idea what they're doing. First the stupid age verification which will eventually result in massive leak of private information, now this.

If they wanted to save the environment they should push for mix of nuclear and renewable energy sources. But that requires effort...

More processing might result in more water use, but storage? It makes no actual sense. Having more stuff sitting in your storage isn’t making your computer hotter.

In fact, I guess creating a guideline for servers to use more efficient processors would do much more for that.

That's not the take-home here. We should regulate large companies, but as ever, individual choices both have direct effects on the environment, and indirect effects which influence the behaviour of a small number of more powerful organisations. Also important is that individual choices in the political realm influence what regulations get made, so we're never absolved of a responsibility to the environment.

The take-home for me is that the government is using long-discredited statistics relating storage to water usage. Stored emails don't increase water usage by an appreciable percentage.

...because you horde emails.

I've never large-group-of-peopled my emails but have been known to hoard them.

This is analogous to the "I'm using paper straws while the billionaires take a private jet each to Venice" situation.

So I should delete old mails so that maybe (and actually no, it won't) there will be less drives to cool in the datacentre while the techbros have entire datacentres using hundreds of terawatts of power[1] and is predicted to be using billions of cubic metres of water per year by 2027[2].

As usual, they're looking toward the people they can influence to make changes to their lifestyle, and ignoring the people actually doing the damage because they know they will not change.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024: IEA annual report showing that AI and crypto is estimated to have consumed 465tw/h of energy in 2024. [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water: Forbes report stating that AI datacentres are estimated to use around 6.6 billion cubic metres of water by the year 2027.

The country is riddled with leaky mains pipes because water companies are more concerned with allocating huge bonuses to themselves than they are with fixing infrastructure.

Now we're courting tech companies to build more data centres that our other shitty infrastructure (electric) isn't even fit to support because magic money tree go brrrrrrr

This is mandated recycling 2.0. Fill supermarkets with products 99% of which come in plastic wrappers, only successfully recover a fraction of that, and then tell the consumer they're the ones destroying the environment.

If they can fit my 5 recycling boxes up their rear, then they can shove this up their arse too.

I suggest spitting to lose weight

A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate.

So pass a law banning evaporative cooling systems from all industrial and commercial applications (or single out data centers), give them 6 months to comply and start handing out fines every day past the deadline.

I never heard so much bs in a single article. Those files and emails are stored on cold storage, and is using zero water. I guess it's a good thing to remove old files and empty your trash bin, both in real life as well as digital.

But this article makes no sense at all. Just one query to an AI will use so much more energy and water in comparison with your old email in cold storage. It's a joke.

Ps. By removing your files now, and checking the contents, you are actually moving the files from cold storage to hot. Meaning the server will load the data into memory etc. Which will actually makes this drought worse, not better.

How about deleting private ownership of utilities instead?

I tried deleting my files but I was age checked...

I hope the Department that released this guidance is being absolutely pilloried in UK media. What an absolutely worthless, dishonest pile of crap.

How is deleting locally-stored files on your home PC going to save water, when your hardware sips resources vs. any AI datacenter in existence?

Authoritarian and incompetent.

Just like all the other Fascists.

I don't think I will. In fact, I think I'll download more.

Absolute farce of a country

I'll also wear blue clothing to have the same impact

Well, deleting stuff causes a load of processing that wouldn't have otherwise happened... So I guess I should have some coal barbecues?

So where does this water go after evaporating or leaking from your toilet? Is it flying into deep space and being lost for our planet forever?