With 'thank you' emails polite Britons burn thousands of tonnes of carbon a year | Hacker News Reader

With 'thank you' emails polite Britons burn thousands of tonnes of carbon a year

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9 pointsknown16 comments

How the heck does that work out? Wouldn't a single YouTube video, or even viewing a single ad covered javascript infested website completely dwarf the environmental impact of email?

There is something bizarrely surreal about this awareness campaign.

It's a puff piece for Ovo Energy. Any old crap to get their name into some news articles.

This is complete BS, and just a wrong attempt at marketing promotion.

"OVO Energy has created software to identify when a user has sent a potentially unnecessary email and prompt them to be more thoughtful."

Oh really, and how much energy does that app suck up (and the resources to develop it)? A lot more than sending an email I'll wager, which is essentially free, if your computer and the internet is on anyway, given such low resource requirements to send an email.

And how much energy has this non/fake-news press release wasted? Hypocrites.

That is actively dumb.

If sending thanks costs too much carbon, running Python, PHP, or Ruby on servers, or generating dynamic pages when a static page would do, costs hundreds of times as much.

This is just silly. Assuming their estimate of 16433 t of CO2 per year[0] is correct, a person sending one e-mail less per day, throughout the year, would reduce their annual carbon footprint by:

16433 / 60e6 / 10 * 100% = 0.0027% [1]

See also MacKay's Without Hot Air take on a similar topic.[2]

Since OVO is an energy company, they definitely should know better. Charitably, they're being extraordinarily stupid. Uncharitably they're trying to push their "Carbon Capper" chrome extension which is probably spyware or trying to distract people from more serious issues.

[0] https://www.ovoenergy.com/ovo-newsroom/press-releases/2019/n...

[1] The UK has a population of about 60 million and the CO2 footprint is about 10 t per person.

[2] https://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml

Probably trying to divert attention away from their pretty poor customer service record https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/how-citizens-advi...

Does this count as fluff, or fake news?

Here's more information from the study:

https://www.ovoenergy.com/ovo-newsroom/press-releases/2019/n...

Here is an interesting bit:

‘64 million unnecessary emails sent every day is contributing 23,475 tonnes of carbon a year’ 64,317,204 unnecessary emails sent by Brits every day x1 email = 1g carbon = 0.000001 tonnes CO2e per email (Source: Mike Berners-Lee) 64,317,204 x 0.000001 = 64.317 tonnes CO2e per day 64.317 x 365 = 23,475.779 = 23,476 tonnes CO2e per year

Even if estimates were true, not sending an email still produces the same amount of CO2, or even worse, as people go waste this free time on entertainment, like watching videos, playing games.

I am highly skeptical of this conclusion.
I expect this study does not account for economies of scale. If I'm already downloading 100 emails from my provider, one additional email does not have any significant environmental impact.

Presumably sitting typing an e-mail on your PC with screen on is where most of the energy consumption comes from.

I guess stuff like this is how they must have arrived at these ridiculous numbers. I know my screen would be on whether I was typing an email or not.

Article doesn't link to any study, so I don't know the method.
However, I wish email had like a feature that's something akin to the Slack reaction emojis, say a thumbs up or something.
Sometimes I've sent emails asking someone to do something, they've replied saying they've done the thing, it seems polite to say thank you but also its extending the chain further for a two word response.

Most probable a emoji in Slack uses more resources than a email.

Where's the evidence?

It's just marketing bollocks but their attempt to justify it is at the bottom of their press release https://www.ovoenergy.com/ovo-newsroom/press-releases/2019/n...

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