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Climate change: Can sending fewer emails really save the planet?

Are you the type of person who always says thank you? Well, if it's by email, you should stop, according to UK officials looking at ways to save the environment.

The Financial Times reports that we may all soon be encouraged to send one fewer email a day, cutting out “useless” one-line messages – such as “thanks”.

Doing so “would save a lot of carbon”, one official involved in next year's COP26 climate summit in Glasgow said.

But would it really make a huge difference?

Why do emails produce carbon at all?
Most people tend to think of the internet as a cloud that exists outside their computing hardware. But the reality is when you send an email – or anything else – it goes along a chain of energy-burning electronics.

Your wi-fi router sends the signal along wires to the local exchange – the green box on the street corner – and from there to a telecoms company, and from there to huge data centres operated by the tech giants. Each of those runs on electricity, and it all adds up.

Are my emails a big environmental problem?
The Financial Times report says the officials promoting this idea referred to a press release from renewable electricity firm Ovo Energy from one year ago.

It claimed that if every British person sent one fewer thank you email a day, it would save 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of flights to Europe.

The problem, however, is that even if the sums involved roughly worked out, it would still be a splash in the pond.

What can make a difference?
Rather than worrying about relatively low-impact emails, some researchers suggest we should turn our attention to services such as game and video-streaming and cloud storage which have a much larger effect.

But the topic is immensely complicated, and there is a debate about how estimates should be calculated – and who should be responsible for it.

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