With many parts of England grappling with a water shortage, the UK’s National Drought Group (NDG), which includes both government and non-government agencies, has suggested citizens can help by… clearing out their inboxes.
“Simple, everyday choices — such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails — also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife,” Helen Wakeham, the agency’s director of water and NDG chair said in a statement. The NDG also suggested deleting old pictures.
Turning off the tap and avoiding unnecessary water use will certainly help to ease drought conditions. But, while it’s true that datacenter thermal management systems can consume large quantities of water in order to keep the servers from overheating, it’s not immediately clear how big an impact clearing out your spam folder will really have.
The Register has reached out to Microsoft and Google, two of the largest email service providers on the net for comment, but hadn’t heard back at the time of publication.
One thing that UK netizens could do to curb their water use digitally is lay off the generative AI apps and services. And with Google’s Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 positively crawling with AI features, that might include avoiding sending extraneous emails. Bad news, folks, the meeting could have been an email, but we’re trying to save water here.
A recent environmental report from French model builder Mistral AI found that generating a single 400 token response — amounting to about a page worth of text — using its Mistral Large 2 model consumed roughly 45 milliliters of water and generated about 1.14 grams of CO2e. While that might not sound like much, it adds up quickly as we scale to millions of users with dozens of requests each.
These findings closely align with an earlier study that estimated generating between 10-50 medium sized responses using a model in the 175 billion parameter range would consume about half a liter of water.
According to the UK’s NDG, five areas of England are now officially in drought and six more are experiencing prolonged dry weather following what is now the driest six months since 1976. The government defines the situation as a “nationally significant incident.” ®