Are e-mail attachments bad for the environment? Data-storage expert Matthew Yeager thinks so. In an interview with Mother Jones, Yeager compares the greenhouse gases created from sending a 4.7 megabyte-sized email attachment to boiling a kettle of water 17.5 times. As we inch over the one zettabyte marker of stored data worldwide, that’s — well, a whole lot of kettles. Yeager argues that redundancy represents a huge share of stored data, something to consider before sending that cute bunny photo to 300 of your closest friends. [%comments]
Dirty Data?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
So that “Dirty Dancing ” Download Peer Fileshare is also Dirty Data Dancing Needlessly.
***But after all, I concluded that if we did not have attachments, we would send far more physical copies, requiring gas for trucks and airplanes. ***
I disagree. The marginal cost of a big email attachment (storage, sending via email, archving) = zero. It shouldn’t be.
If email attachments/computer server storage were somehow metered, people would “shockingly” be more economical of what gets sent/saved/created.
***While I agree with the other comments that the statistics supporting this assumption are completely absurd. ***
Simple solution.
Someone should ask Google what its storage/electricity costs would be if every gmail user used only 1GB of their 8GB gmail account.
@4- Ian Mason…..Right on. Saved me the trouble.
It is always amazing what people will swallow without checking….Innumeracy.
Every year Americans eat enough ice cream to fill the Grand Canyon…..or maybe not.
Back in about 1990, a common program for accessing the Usenet newsgroups would print a message when you posted a message:
“This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny] ”
Given that there were millions of messages posted each day and the worldwide expenditure on Usenet servers and bandwidth was clearly not hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars per day, this was clearly an overestimate.
The Freakonomists seem to be very weak in science, especially physics, and reminds me of some of the whoppers they made in their analysis of global warming – to echo a point made before where is their “street fighting” mathematics on this one?
Not so fast. He may have a point. Think about the email being stored on a server, not transmitted. It sits there forever. I have 5 year old emails in my inbox. It’s probably stored in several different locations, just in case one of them has a problem. All of those servers burn lots of electricity to run, and especially to cool. Have you ever been to a data center? It’s amazing how much energy gets used to store data. My 2 cents.
Nice work! Can’t wait to email this blog to everyone I know.