The convenience¹ of email inspires a huge bias in favor of email (and likely confirmation bias to a large extent). But if you can detach from the tyranny of convenience and look at email critically, it does not look like such an obvious best choice ecologically. Consider these inconvenient facts:
- Advertising → people needlessly buy more stuff as a result of ads that are fed by email content
- Google sells machine learning to fossil fuel corporations (see also YT video
v3n8txX3144) - Google finances climate deniers
- Apple, Amazon, Google & Microsoft have teamed up to block Right-To-Repair laws.
- Google’s Android phones (and other smart devices) are only updated for a few yrs
- Google got caught excluding climate effects except CO₂ from Google Flights search results
- Google accepted money from Bayer Monsanto to bury unfavorable news (and Bayer-Monsanto is environmentally harmful)
- War is bad for the environment and Google supports Russia’s war (but says they are scaling back)
Google’s support for fossil fuels is probably the most notable problem. Microsoft is even worse than Google (see item 11). Even if you are the rare netizen who uses an ethical email provider, probably over 95% of your email traffic is with a gmail or outlook user. Nearly all corporations and gov agencies are using Microsoft for email service but it’s masked by their vanity addresses. Of course PGP is not an option for ~95+% of your email traffic, so MS and Google profit from your traffic in both directions because it all feeds their advertising networks. From there, the ads fuel consumerism, leading to more purchases of shit that takes a toll on the environment.
So how good is email for the environment when you take all factors into account?
I restricted the dirt above to ecocide as this is a climate forum, but once you also account for non-environmental factors like privacy abuses, MS and Google are a clear non-starter.
¹ I use “convenience” more loosely than justified because email is very inconvenient for some of us, like people who run their own mail servers in order to not needlessly feed extra 3rd parties. The anti-spammers have really ruined the convenience and availability of email by going to extremes that impose colatteral damage on legit email. So it’s not really fair to call email convenient any longer.
Fax
A fax can be sent without printing. Your letter just needs to be formatted for US letter or A4 and in a raster graphic. More often than not, the receiving side is a service that attaches the letter to an email and sends it to the recipient, who likely uses Microsoft.
The pros:
- You can withhold your email address from the letter, thus preventing an email reply (which would then feed the MS ad network and lead to more purchases).
- MS must work harder to snoop and OCR the raster image. But do they? Idk. If they do, it would expend more energy. But if they don’t, the msg avoids feeding the ad network.
The cons:
- The electronic payload is more bulky, thus uses more energy per msg.
Paper letters
Paper must be used, but the paper industry has trended toward sustainabilty and some regions have a mandate on recycling paper (yes, it is illegal to toss recyclable paper in with other waste in wise parts of the world). Unprinting has made progress, which would enable you to erase toner from a page to reuse it.
When a recipient in my city uses Google or Microsoft for email and they have no fax number, I print my correspondence on paper and cycle to their mailbox. It’s a way of saying fuck you to the giant surveillance advertisers. And because all kinds of tech rights and ethics are being pissed on by Google and MS in addition to their environmental abuses, this approach is the clear winner for me.
It’s not exactly obvious which choice is the least harmful for the environment without research that really dissects it and looks at the nuts and bolts of it. But I conjecture that if enough people were to switch back to fax and paper letters and cause inconvenience for Microsoft & Google recipients, it would drive them to choose more ethical email providers in order to esacape the burden of scanning paper and then the cost of paying the postal service to carry their reply. This ultimately favors a more sustainable path even if it’s taking a step backwards in order to take more steps forwards.
The raw figures
- email (excl. indirect impacts): 0.3—50g CO₂/msg, depending on msg size
- paper (non-recycled, excl. ink): 4.29—4.74g CO₂/sheet
- envelope: 24g according to a source I don’t trust. That figure does not specify whether it refers to a windowed envelope. I have recently started saving and reusing inbound windowed envelopes by separating the side seam. LaTeX’s KOMAscript pkg has presets for standard envelopes and also gives a way to enter geometry so the address aligns with a nonstandard window.
The email figure is raw energy consumption assuming the email provider is ethical. It does not account for Google and MS’s involvement in the fossil fuel business, the extra consumption of unnecessary goods due to ads, and all the other factors mentioned. If you send a pure text email and the response comes from an org that attaches an image to every response (cosmetic stationary), it’s comparable to the footprint of a sheet of paper + envelope (still without accounting for the Google/MS factor).
It would be interesting to do for Google and Microsoft what the “Banking on Climate Chaos” paper did for banks, which was to rightfully factor all their harmful activity into their footprint.
Ok...I get what you're saying...but your conclusion doesn't match your title. Correct me if I'm wrong but your post says that email is bad because most people use Gmail/outlook so we should start using the old, supposedly more eco-friendly, paper mail....for a little while...until we switch back to email.
I don't care if all the paper is recyclable/recycled when the first R is REDUCE. The only way physical mail could be environmentally-preferable is if we lived in a fantasy world where all mail is local and the mailman rides a bike. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
An "email protest" will not work because they do not care about the individual user. You said it yourself that most companies use these services so unless you can convince thousands of IT admins to pull the plug, the only impact will be a slight increase in emissions from paper mail.
I do like where your head is at so please don't take my criticism as an insult, I just think you drew the wrong conclusion after assessing the problem. I would be totally on board if your goal was to get stop using these providers....but I completely disagree with the steps you've laid out to accomplish it
The title is the thesis (thus conclusion). Are you saying the raw figures contradict that? I believe boycotting Google and MS are a pathway to a better environment, even if the footprint is bigger in the short-term. We really don’t have accurate figures to go off of because no one has researched the MS / Google specific footprint per email (AFAIK).
The transition for activists goes like this: MS email (2023) → paper mail (2024) → non-MS email (future)
In my city it is the fantasy you describe. Postal workers are on foot or bicycle for the most part. It’s likely uncommon from a worldwide standpoint but I’m talking about a campaign anyway, not necessarily a permanent transition.
You’re assuming the paper option is the end game, as opposed to a driver for better email.
You don’t really know to what extent the office worker who receives the letter cares. Office workers are largely helpless to make changes from the inside on their own initiative, but if the will is there and they get a complaint from the outside, then the insider who cares is happy to amplify the complaint using the outside complaint as their excuse so that it does not appear to be from them. Your complaint empowers insider pawns to act. Even if the insider pawn does not care about the environment, they still hate having to deal with paper letters (scanning and filing, then stuffing envelopes and applying postage). Then the org has to buy return postage. They hate it to the point that they look for ways to pass costs back onto the consumer. It’s enough disturbance to compel questions about why the electronic system is not working. I will state right in my letters “could not get past your CAPTCHA” or “I don’t do CAPTCHAs”. (btw, most CAPTCHAs are graphical and have a higher GHG footprint than a letter)
Everything you do results in a signal. When you vote in an election, you send a signal that the voting system is working. When you send an email, you signal that email is working and that you are onboard with it. In my case as an admin of my own mail server, I am actually blocked from MS and Google mail servers. So I add that to the msg “could not email you because your server blocked me likely due to an overly aggressive anti-spam policy”. (Of course tech folks know anti-spam is the excuse that ppl just accept without question.. it’s really about the bottom line of MS reducing the cost of spam mitigation using sloppy techniques that are high in collateral damage because it has the side-effect of forcing more people onto the platforms of tech giants which effectively grows the monopoly).
For me email to MS and Google users is trivially wholly the wrong answer as climate is not my sole issue. Feeding my oppressors (surveillance advertisers) is a hard NO anyway. Perhaps my stance is a hard-sell to folks who narrowly care about the environment but not privacy, consumer rights, tech rights, etc. So I am curious what people think strictly from the environmental case that I’ve made.
Dropping off a paper letter is like a ballot. You are voting against whatever shitty digital system they are attempting. It’s important to support analog systems for at least as long as the digital systems are in a shitty state. So it’s not just a vote against crappy tech but simultaneously a vote that says “we need to keep analog mechanisms around”. But unlike voting, you need not have a majority. You just need to get attention, which could happen with a well written letter amid a few other letters perhaps w/out reason and the right receiving staff. If the recipient does not give a shit, then indeed it takes enough paper letters to impact the bottom line before they start asking questions, assuming they care about the bottom line.