Impact of e-mails on our environment

Dear Sir,

The article, “Nothing ‘virtual’ about climate impact of e-mails” (Gulf Times, March 20),  made a striking and frightening  point. We all thought e-mails and twitters never had any impact on the environment. How wrong we were!
A short e-mail, according to the article, is estimated to add about four grammes of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere.
By comparison, humanity emits some 40bn tonnes of CO2 every year. So the e-mail impact on our environment is not much now. But as the digital era deepens, the accumulated volume of virtual messages will  become a significant part of humanity’s carbon footprint.
Electricity consumption related to the growth of digital technologies is exploding, according to the article.
In France it already accounts for more than 10% of total electricity use.
Sending five dozen of those four-gramme e-mails in a day from your smartphone or laptop is the equivalent of driving an average-size car a kilometre.
The culprits are greenhouse gases produced in running the computer, server and routers. They also include those emitted when the equipment was manufactured.
Add a one-megabyte (MB) attachment - a photo or invitation, say - and the energy consumed would be enough to power a low-wattage lightbulb for two hours.
If that e-mail is sent to a mailing list, multiply by the number of recipients.
E-mail tips for the energy-conscious include avoiding unnecessary recipients, slimming the weight of attachments, emptying your trash box.
And then there’s spam. Anti-virus software maker McAfee estimates that upward of 60tn spams are sent each year, generating the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3mn cars using 7.5bn litres of petrol. So, my friends be careful with those e-mails and forwards. They are not that harmless as we thought to be.

Rajesh Nair. rajeshnair.it@gmail.com

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