Email signatures are damaging the planet and potentially causing damage to people's lives – time to stop using them – What about Wattwat?

[editor’s note: Russell Cook emailed this article to Marc Morano and myself asking:

Marc & Charles,

Poe’s Law says that without a satire indicator, deep satire is increasingly difficult to distinguish from wacko sincere writings. I truly cannot tell if this writer is being serious or is taking one heckuva deep jab at zealot far-left nutcases:

To which I responded:

I think the publishers think it’s serious, but it appears planted as in the Sokal hoax.

The primary reference to pronouns and land acknowledgements, two leftist shibboleths, and not addresses, company information, although it does talk about disclaimers, leads me me to think it’s planted.

What do you guys think?

/editor’s note]

Joshua M. Pearce, Western University

The use of information technology (IT) has significant environmental and social impacts, including human mortality rates due to climate change. A compelling example is the carbon emissions and impacts associated with digital communications.

To quantify the labor costs of carbon emission technology, the researchers used a 1,000-ton rule that estimates that every 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and a person dies prematurely.

The rule stems from the calculation that burning one trillion tons of fossil carbon may lead to 2 c artificial global warming, which in turn leads to approximately one billion premature deaths in the next century.

This theory can be used as a decision-making framework for decision makers to compare the value of activities with the costs in human life.

I also used other information in email signatures in my recent study to contribute to climate-related deaths in Canada.

Email signature causes emissions

Sending email is a daily activity, but it comes with environmental costs. Email uses energy, which is often derived from burning fossil fuels, which in turn help increase carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activities are destabilizing climate and may cause irreversible damage to the global environment and humanity.

My recent research explores the environmental impact of extended email signatures, specifically targeting two messages: gender pronouns and land confirmation, as both are relatively new additions to email signatures.

In both cases, additional carbon emissions per email are estimated and aggregated among the population using them.

The results show that in Canada, about 15% of people include gender pronouns in their emails, and under the 1,000 ton rule, this small change in carbon emissions could lead to premature deaths in a person every year.

The environmental damage and human mortality caused by this seemingly smaller digital habit is evident. Large amounts of text such as legal disclaimers and land confirmations have caused even greater harm. Images and logos containing more data can lead to more emissions and deaths.

Cancel email signature

Most of the content in an email signature is redundant because we tend to email the same person repeatedly. The environmental and artificial costs of using email signatures clearly outweigh the benefits. One solution to this problem is to replace the email signature to other information with the hyperlink name.

Another easy way to increase efficiency and reduce emissions is to completely eliminate email signatures, because emails have identified the sender in the title. After all, we don't sign text, so why do we need to sign our email?

If you receive an email with a longer signature, you can consider asking the sender to switch to the hyperlink, or eliminating its signature.

Additionally, you can encourage others to use free open source ad blockers to reduce unnecessary data from ads when browsing or emailing. Advertising, especially on websites, generates a lot of unnecessary data and energy consumption.

Although these steps themselves seem small, they can have a significant impact in reducing digital waste and unnecessary emissions.

Hidden costs of spam emails

My recent research results clearly show that Canada's current IT and energy infrastructure is unsustainable. This study should serve as a wake-up call to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels in our energy systems, especially since it is already possible to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy at lower costs.

It also has a greater destructive impact on other forms of digital communications, especially email spam.

Spam accounts for more than half of all emails, and although each email has a lower carbon emission (because many emails are deleted without opening), spam accounts for the data generated by the data. In addition to environmental losses, spam also wastes every email user’s time.

In response, some suggestions and laws have been made to reduce such digital waste, including taxes on email, opt-in or opt-out of the system, to a completely declared spam ban. Even though these efforts are a step in the right direction, we all still suffer from a lot of spam.

The environmental impact of our online habits far exceeds the awareness of most people, and as digital communication continues to evolve, we must consider its long-term consequences for the environment and human life. We should take simple steps to reduce wasteful energy use and thus start eliminating email signatures.

Joshua M. Pearce, Chairman and Professor of Information Technology and Innovation, John M. Thompson, Western University

This article is republished from the conversation under the Creative Sharing License. Read the original article.

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