You've got drought: UK gov suggests you save water by deleting old emails 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 …
Or you could charge the heaviest commercial users more given that they are having the largest impact on those people who need water (i.e. small-usage residentials) and have the most money with which to fund this stuff.
It's a nonsense that I can't water a 3m x 3m garden with a hose, but datacentres can slurp whatever the hell they like.
Not using f'ing AI saves already a lot, and I would argue enough. Unfortunately it is now baked into most websearch engines.
Don't use AI. The huge bit barns they are building basically everywhere? Big problem.
So: AI companies steal all content, f' up the planet, f' up the environment, f' up our internet. Don't feed them more money, dear gubmint!
True, we had "Protect and Survive." With the most ridiculous fallout shelter imaginable.
I can only imagine it was intended to give us doomed plebs a comforting illusion of control.
Granted it's a lot harder to grade the naughties now you need to provide identification. On the one hand, the reduction in streaming may benefit the environment, or on the other hand the potential use of a VPN causing more international traffic and undoing the works that CDNs have been doing may make it worse...
So my decision to move to Linux has made me environmentally friendlier. The new pc probably hasn't got enough oomph to run Win11 well I happily have avoided any onboard AI, Microsith spyware or anything else to use water. I'd use even less if I hadn't decided to replace my old dell.
The UK has just had one of its wettest winters ever. The problem is that the useless, greedy, corrupt fecking govt and the useless, greedy, corrupt fecking Water authorities, despite knowing that the climate was changing, didn't build the reservoirs we needed. For taking our money and just putting it in the pockets of their shareholders, those responsible in the water industry should be in prison.
Now we get blamed and punished by those who have failed us, who should themselves be paying for it with their jobs, their ill gotten gains and their freedom. And when it is national infrastructure, it is not fraud, it is treason.
I would love to know how many times COBRA met to consider issues like drought and flooding over the last 2 decades, and whether any of the cabinet could be arsed to turn up.
Well.... here on the continent, total precipitation in winter is one thing, but a big problem is that this now falls as rain and runs off rather than as snow which melts and then seeps into the ground and refills our ground water reservoirs (still, lots of runoff and spring floods of rivers always was a thing right, Cologne?) Also note that while there are reservoirs, like Eder lake (you know, the one you built the dam buster for, causing a flash flood, wiping out a bunch of viallages down stream?) they often run low in summer. They are expensive and a lot of wok to build and do have serious engineering and environmental problems (Vajont dam, Three Gorges dam, or the one used to steal water to dump it into LA that then broke and wiped out a bunch of villages). Not wasting ground water on planting stupid crops or watering golf courses or lawns in general would be a good start (I have some local rain water storage for my tomato plants, bit more than a cubic metre, about 1000 imperial quarts, the bit of grass in the garden looks like the Serengeti, I don't care), not just evaporating water for stupid shite like more AI data centres would be great (and not throwing money at those tech boes, who should have a "nice day", to f' us over even more).
Ahem....
The Pennines are not the Sierras. Here in the Western US we rely a lot on the snowpack in the Sierras for our annual water supply. Back in Blighty there isn't a snowpack so you have to rely on rainfall to fill your reservoirs. These need to be managed to suit the supply which, unfortunately, involves "investment", something that's anathema to for-profit corporations (and their hedge fund owners). They've learned its far more cost effective to bombard the public with propaganda about how evil they are to turn on that tap (or, God forbid, use a hosepipe). "Pay more for less" is the modern business model.
"The problem is that the useless, greedy, corrupt fecking govt and the useless, greedy, corrupt fecking Water authorities, "
Not disagreeing with you description of government at all, and not disagreeing with your description of the water companies in general, but as regards not building reservoirs, this is most definitely not something to blame the water companies for. As I have previously noted, Thames Water having been trying to build Abingdon reservoir for about 20 years, and have been repeated blocked by OFWAT.
South West water has just (well, October 2024) confirmed plan to build Cheddar 2 reservoir - which they proposed in 2007, started survey work for in 2012, but then scrapped due to OFWAT in 2018.
The lack of reservoir building in the UK is directly due to the useless official regulator, OFWAT, that has actively blocked any new reservoir construction in the UK for a couple of decades.
The good news is that OFWAT is to be abolished. The bad news is that the useless, greedy, corrupt fecking govt is creating " a new, single, powerful regulator" that will likely be even more wasteful and incompetent.
Went to a talk once by the water company explain what they were doing at the village. All the local water comes from a set of boreholes into the aquifer and all the waste is injected back into the aquifer after treating... The local problem was that agricultural runoff was raising the nitrogen level above the safety limit, hence the work that was going to take 18 months and block roads and cause disruption.
Anyhow he went on about how the water companies are strictly regulated by OFWAT, basically they know they need to spend £££ to bring the network up to scratch, but that means passing the cost directly or indirectly onto consumers - the money has to come from somewhere - and OFWAT basically limits what they can charge. So while they defiantly skim of the top for their CEO, they are forbidden from taking on too much debt or raising the water bills to cover investment. The bloke hailed this as the best/strictest regulation and that it was good for us. I thought this is bonkers...
Basically what happened was the government wouldn't invest the required cash when it was publicly owned, and privatised it - but prevented the private companies from raising enough cash to really do the required investments. They were set-up to fail - though I accept that the skimmed off lots of profits for their top people and shareholders in the mean time.
Infrastructure is expensive and no one wants to pay for it, but is happy to grumble decades later when it doesn't work...
"Basically what happened was the government wouldn't invest the required cash when it was publicly owned, and privatised it - but prevented the private companies from raising enough cash to really do the required investments. They were set-up to fail - though I accept that the skimmed off lots of profits for their top people and shareholders in the mean time."
This is untrue. They were not set-up to fail. That only happened once the spivs and speculators moved in to make a quick buck. In reality, they raped the water companies for billions. And still do.
The water companies were sold off for far less than they were worth and IIRC their then debts stayed with the government. [Just like most privatisations.] They didn't need to raise cash because (a) they had a licence to print money because they were monopolies with captive customers; (b) they had lots of unencumbered assets (land mostly) that could be sold off. This legacy should have been more than enough to provide viable, responsible and well-funded businesses that took care of our water and sewage networks.
However these greedy bastards *chose* not to spend money on infrastructure or fixing their leaking pipes. Ofwat let them. It was and is cheaper for water companies to dump untreated sewage in our rivers and pay chickenfeed fines on the rare occasions the authorities could be bothered to prosecute them. Then the vulture capitalists moved in. They realised they could milk these cash cows and load them up with unsustainable debt which fuelled an artificial boom in dividends and boardroom pay. Ofwat and the government let them do that. Vulture capitalists have looted the nation's water companies and left them on the verge of insolvency, stuck with crumbling infrastructure which is mostly unchanged from Victorian times.
Set up to fail? I don't think so. They set themselves up to fail. Gross negligence by the authorities and ineffective regulation made that inevitable.
"stuck with crumbling infrastructure which is mostly unchanged from Victorian times"
Death of Queen Victoria (end of Victorian times): 1901
Water privatisation: 1989
Number of years that the state (municipal water companies, etc) had to repair the crumbling Victoria infrastructure and modernise the system, expand capacity to allow removal of Combined Sewer Outfalls etc, fix leaks etc; 88 years.
Number of years that the privatised water companies have had to do the same (and actually have done*, though not enough): 36 years
*we keep having this conversation.
Tideway / Thames super sewer (2000 to 2025).
Ending the dumping of raw sewage sludge at sea (Bovril Boats, when operating from the Thames, but they operated from various other cities): 1998 (having operated since 1887, so for 98 years under state control)
Replacing the short sea outfalls that municipal (state) water companies used to discharge raw sewage to sea (at distances above low water mark) throughout the period that those authorities were state controlled, with long sea outfalls that at least took it below low water (early 1990s)...
... Followed by constructing water treatment plants at the UKs coastal towns so untreated raw sewage was no longer discharged routinely to sea (throughout the 1990s).
That we recognisably had crumbling Victorian infrastructure at the time of provatisation is fairly definitive evidence of the extent to which the state under-funded water and wastewater provision in the UK. If they had not under-funded it, the infrastructure would have been neither Victorian nor crumbling.
So? It doesn't matter. The point is, it's not some surprise. They knew the state of the infrastructure beforehand, but they were being given a company with a monopoly, and obviously decided that all the real estate, guaranteed customers, and infrastructure that was available made the whole process financially viable.
If it wasn't, they wouldn't have bought/invested in these companies.
No, either they knew the income would cover infrastructure changes (why else do we pay water bills?) or they knew they could not bother investing and then bail when the shit hits the sand.
Well said. If the companies were set up to fail, they'd never have gone for the franchises in the first place.
They knew the state of "victorian sewers" and either knew that they would be getting enough income to deal with them, or they thought they could get away with not bothering. Either way, it wasn't some surprising new cost - they knew exactly what they were taking on at the time, and as you say, the spivs and speculators went in and asset stripped the companies whilst ofwat did nothing.
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> passing the cost directly or indirectly onto consumers - the money has to come from somewhere
It already does - it's called a water bill.
You know, my groceries bill doesn't go up when the local Tesco's needs a new roof, not does my bus fare suddenly rise when one of the buses needs a new engine...
We're clearly in the silly season when the most dire, worthless pish can get media attention.
Deleting old email or whatever won't make the slightest difference to the temperature of the device where it was stored. The rust will still be spinning or the SSD will still be powered on. Which means the device will need the same amout of cooling water (if it had any) as it did before the old email got deleted. Same goes for temperatures at the DC if those emails were stored in the cloud somewhere.
I wonder too if the oxygen thief who put their name to this piece of mindless drivel went to the bother of getting any data to back it up. If they deleted any old email, what difference did it make to their water bill?
Instead of coming up with brain-dead press releases, what is the National Drought Group actually doing to reduce the possibility of droughts, for instance fixing the leaks in the nation's water pipes or replacing the worn-out taps and washers in our homes? Where are their press releases about that?
You're missing the obvious about what all the leaking underground lead pipes to former outdoor privvies are losing all the time nationwide. Dripping tap? It's a drop in the bucket versus these leaking lead pipes.
You're also missing out on the obvious of all these "AI bit barns" making the problem even worse.
It beggars belief that the UK could ever have a water shortage. We are small island surrounded by billions of gallons of the stuff and it falls out of the sky almost continuously for 9 month of the year. Some areas regularly get flooded every winter. If there are water shortages, it is entirely due to lack of investment in storage and distribution infrastructure by the privatised water companies.
Datacentres make it worse, but they're not the cause.
The UK hasn't started building any significant water storage whatsoever since privatisation in 1989, and has in fact been closing the smaller ones!
- Carsington Water opened in 1992, construction began in 1989 and the project long before then.
Thames Water is bankrupt, so nationalisation would actually cost a nominal £1.
It will, of course, have an adverse effect.
Because it will cause the values of some bits to be changed, to reflect the deletions that you have made. (The images or emails will not be changed.)
And that, of course, will use up more energy than leaving the items alone.
It's more insidious than that. The act of cleaning out those folders will trigger additional analytics trying to find patterns, to create more useful targeting information for the advertising-industrial complex. Of course, petaflops will be burned to generate what is likely to be "marginally useful data" like attempting to sell drugs for prevention of ovarian cysts to a senior citizens mens club no-reply email address. (Why, yes! I am feeling particularly snarky about marketing this lifetime. Why do you ask?)
Whatever extra energy is used it will be at xN datacentres as the data is replicated numerous times around the globe so perhaps the (useless) UN can have (another) go at Blighty but this time for triggering global electricty usage !
As ever, it's far more important that the oxymoronically named Government and its myriad quangos blame the individual rather than the fat cats in industry, private equity and (in this case) the water companies/OFTWAT.
Where I live in Cambridgeshire we have endless rejoinders re making sure that we do "our bit" for the planet by sifting our recycling and waste into ever-changing bins whilst the council has decided to mix it all together & ship it to Northern Ireland where they proceed to burn it all - you can't get more environmentally friendly than that! Meanwhile the council claim that the NI waste company hasn't broken its promise of planning to open a real recycling centre in mainland UK because they're still planning - they just haven't done anything and it appears they have no actual intention of doing so.
This is the UK. We have tons of freshwater falling. One half decent summer and it's all drought and the oceans are boiling accompanied by dark red weather maps because we broke 25 deg C ... in SUMMER. Anything but addressing the cause which is water management. So we can fund private companies to make CO2 (the gas of life) extraction plants but we can't capture a liquid that falls to the ground in quantity and collects in low lying areas or fix or lay pipelines? What will the EU's "sound water pricing policies" produce I wonder? Lower water charges ... chokes.
Fix the real problem!
But that would take planning & effort & I seriously doubt our illustrious leaders have either ability or any other ability apart from doing the exact opposite of what is actually required.
Much easier for them to use weasel words such as "Climate Emergency" than actually doing something constructive.
Oh for a "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B".
> consumed roughly 45 milliliters of water
Was that water really consumed, i.e. destroyed? Or was it simply changed from one state (liquid) to another (vapour)?
If that water actually did cease to exist, either as molecules or their component atoms, I can see that would be quite a problem. However, if the water just went to join it's own "cloud" then all that has been consumed is the energy needed to transport it's replacement. While that is significant when scaled up to gigawatts of cooling in a data centre, the actual problem is different and has different solutions.
Well, no. All your emails are no match for the videos that you took and stored.
*but*
There's some amount of truth. And you know what? The government could pass a law that limits all these local spam emails that every eshop now sends by default. That would help reduce not just the storage but the processing too. Why aren't we doing that?
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