Hands-On Tech 218 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. Let's take a look at a few things we can do to lower our carbon footprint. Stay tuned.

Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech. Today I, Mikah Sargent, am answering a tech question that I thought was rather interesting. This question comes in from Steven, who has written the following.

Back when I worked in IT full-time about 10 years ago, it was common to see in the signature of emails people reminding each other to think of the environment before printing this email. It became widespread and used to slightly annoy me, so I once changed the signature of my emails to say please remove all attachments and content and recycle this email after use. As a bit of a joke, however, I was using a little bit of logic in that I figured that if the email already existed, then you're saving space on the server by reusing or replying to an existing email rather than creating a new one. This was all before carbon footprints were really a thing and the email was on an on-premise server at the time. I had talked to the email admin at the time and still was never sure if I had a point or not. Anyhow, this has still stuck in my mind all these years, and with more talk about the carbon footprint of data centers. It got me thinking again about the cost savings of reusing emails and if I had really gone barking mad, or if there's anything in it.

This might be a bit too niche to answer in the current format of the show, but it could be expanded into a deeper look at carbon saving techniques in the online world. Most all know about energy saving modes on their devices and so-called greener credentials of hardware, but are there other, less known techniques to reduce your online carbon footprint that are so simple? Then there's what is the cost of an email asking Alexa a question or using an AI tool? Is there a way to be smarter and reduce your carbon footprint but still be productive? So, Stephen, I love this question, so I thought I'd do a little bit of research to try to figure out what is the carbon footprint of an email and what kind of sort of deeply involved in green movements.

They will talk about one of the most sinister aspects of this sort of initiative, and it's not the initiative itself, but instead what is being done to sort of pull focus in a certain way. Pull focus in a certain way, and that is that corporations, large companies, are responsible for the largest impact of carbon emissions and how it affects our planet. And what has happened over time is there's been this subtle shift where focus is being pulled to the individual, to make changes individually, that each individual person needs to make sure that their recycling is here and that the sorting is here and that that is there. And it's important to remember that the biggest impact that we could make as humans is making sure that the big companies are doing what they should be doing, as opposed to making sure that you put the cardboard into the right bin or into the you know compost. That's not to say that those aren't important things and that you shouldn't do them, but it is important to remember that our individual impact is a drop of a drop of a drop of a drop of a drop, of a little plop of the CO2 emissions that exist on the planet. So, with all that in mind, let's talk about it First and foremost, when we look at email, there has been a little bit of research done to try to figure out the sort of carbon footprint of an email, and there was a book that was actually about sort of, I think it was called.

What is it? How Bad Are Bananas, I think was the name of the book, but anyway, let me see if I can pull that up first, because I want to make sure I'm getting that correct. How bad are bananas? The carbon footprint of everything, and in it it talks about the calculations of what we're working with. So a short text-only message averages about 0.3 grams of CO2 emissions, but a long note with a one megabyte plus attachment can push that to near 50 grams of CO2 emissions. So, as you can imagine, that's two orders of magnitude more. If you take out images from your signatures, if you link to cloud files instead of attaching so that you aren't making copies, and you set your client your client to auto delete large or unread newsletters, for example, then that does start to have quite an impact when it comes to sending emails. So, Stephen, yeah, your your sort of original idea that started out as a bit of you know, a little bit of you being, you know, silly, was reasonable and true. It was the case.

There's another place that has big impact and that's video. One hour of HD streaming is about 36 grams of CO2 emissions and it turns out what we're doing right now has quite the impact as well If you turn off your camera during video conferences. So if you know there's sometimes you go to a meeting, a video meeting, and they're going turn on your camera, turn on your John just turned off his camera. Maybe you could say no, I'm being green, I'm leaving my camera off because you slash your CO2 footprint by up to 96% by turning off your camera during video conferences. If you switch from HD to standard definition, if that is an option in your video conferencing tools, that can take 80% off, or just about 80% off. And so ultimately, what does that mean? Well, defaulting to audio when faces aren't essential will have an impact on the bottom line.

Another place to think about you know sort of minding your impact is the cloud storage solution that you choose, and also, you know, getting rid of data that you don't need anymore Stale backups, old email attachments, forgotten photo duplicates. They sit on multiple disks in always-on data centers always-on data centers. If you consider, maybe, going in and removing some of the stuff, that could help save some impact overall, bearing in mind that it could just be that some other customer is going to fly in and take that spot. But I think the bigger thing here is to look at the companies again that are behind these data centers and look at green and do all sorts of impact studies to try to mitigate the concern there, so you could make sure that you are storing your data online in one of those places. Yeah, the IEA has this graphic that kind of talks a little bit about the carbon footprint of the internet as a whole, but also touches on these cloud storage databases and highlights some of the companies that are making changes or have made changes that can have an impact there.

Now another place to look is at your device. If you are a person who switches up phones every year and you aren't mindful about how you get rid of the phone you had before, you could be having an impact, a negative impact Keeping a phone five to seven years instead of two and a half, that would actually have the emissions across its life cycle. Now, manufacturing, of course, is going to have more of an impact than anything, so your individual use day-to-day is not as impactful as the manufacturing of a brand new device. So if everyone, if we had this herd of people who decided we're going to keep our phones five to seven years, then the companies aren't going to manufacture as many devices, which of course, cuts back. But again, that individual impact it's hard to do because on the grand scale and in the grand scheme of things, it's not likely that there's going to be a huge adjustment in how many phones the company is manufacturing. How many phones the company is manufacturing, of course, you can consider, instead of getting rid of the entire device, doing repairs and replacements.

One thing that's kind of fascinating there was a study about when OLED phones really started to take off. There, of course, was the OLED phones really started to take off. There, of course, was the. It wasn't the introduction of dark mode, but it was sort of the re-emergence of dark mode and its popularity, and part of the reason was for that was because dark mode on an OLED device is going to be an energy-saving option, right, because with OLED devices, the black pixels are just completely shut off. There's no light behind that pixel, and so that means that the phone doesn't have to light up as many pixels and therefore is using less energy. Well, it turns out, according to this study, that people who used dark mode on their devices were much more likely to increase the brightness on their phones in such a way that they were using more energy in dark mode than they were if they were just using light mode. So to compensate for the fact that they were in dark mode, feeling like everything was darker, they're cranking the brightness on it and then using more energy.

So, by sort of keeping your phone up to date, you have to think about the sort of trickle down right, the impact on down the line. By keeping your phone up to date, installing updates, by lowering the brightness, by doing all of these things, you're using less battery. And then that means that, in theory, the battery is going to last longer, which means the device is going to last longer, which means that you don't have to replace the battery as often, even if you choose to replace the battery, because replacing the battery also means that now there's this battery out in the world that is hopefully being recycled responsibly, so all of that can have an impact on your individual emissions overall. So, yeah, having the lifespan or, excuse me, having the emissions of your device by using it for at least five years is quite the impact. And then, last but not least, as was brought up, Stephen, in your question, we have to look at the impact of AI. So if you were just to go to Google, I should say maybe DuckDuckGo, because if you go to Google now, there is that AI summary for many people right at the top. So let's say DuckDuckGo. A typical web search reportedly emits about 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. A generative AI prompt can be four to 10 times higher. So consider batching questions, caching routine answers locally, relying on simpler voice assistant queries when possible, because that will keep energy bills and emissions in check.

So when it comes to this, you again have to be mindful. But you may remember that recent thing about Sam Altman saying that people saying thank you and all these sort of graciousness moments that we apply to human being conversations but applied to AI were costing, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not more. I think it was much more than hundreds of thousands, but anyway a lot of money, right that people were having this impact. Well, it turns out that one individual person saying thank you doesn't have much of an impact at all. It's, of course, when everybody is doing it. So again, we just have to be mindful of how much has to change in order for that to happen. And all of that's to say don't beat yourself up too much. Any small changes you're able to make is great, and you are. You know the fact that you're even thinking about this and trying to work toward doing it is is really good. So, yeah, those are some things to keep in mind.

I actually a couple of points from this Mike Berners-Lee book a long email that takes 10 minutes to write and three seconds to read 17 grams of CO2 emissions. If it's got one image or attachment, that's 50 grams of CO2 emissions Over the course of a year. A person's average email usage varies between three to 40 kilograms of CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent of driving between 10 to 128 miles in a small gas car. So, again, small on an individual scale, but if you think about the 3.9 billion email users across the world, well, that's quite the chunk. So, Stephen, you're on to something, and I would love to remind all of you that you could be on to something too, that something being Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit.

When you join the club, you will gain some pretty awesome benefits. We've got monthly and yearly plans available to you, and joining the club means you gain access to the ad-free versions of all of our shows. You gain access to the Twit+ bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else Behind the scenes. Before the show. After the show special Club Twit events get published there and access to the members only Discord server. Leo and I will be doing a live like all-day event. We're going to be talking about WWDC and the platform State of the Union next a week and a day and we're looking forward to that very much so.

So be sure to tune in if you are a Club Twit member. If you aren't a Club Twit member, well, join the club because now's the time. Very exciting stuff twit.tv/clubtwit. All right, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Hands on Tech. I want to remind all of you out there you can email me with your questions. H-O-T@twit.tv is how you get in touch. Would love to hear from you. I am curious to hear what you've got going on, what questions you have, and give you a thorough and detailed answer, one hopes. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll catch you again soon for another episode of Hands-On Tech. Bye!

0:16:12 - Leo Laporte
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