Bloomberg via Japan Times / no paywall: “Everyone has seen warnings at the end of email saying, “Please consider the environment before printing.” But for those who care about global warming, you might want to consider not writing so many emails in the first place. More and more, people rely on their electronic mailbox as a life organizer. Old emails, photos and files from years past sit undisturbed, awaiting a search for a name, address or photo of an old boyfriend. The problem is that all those messages require energy to preserve them. And despite the tech industry’s focus on renewables, the advents of streaming and artificial intelligence are only accelerating the amount of fossil fuels burned to keep data servers up. Right now, data centers consume about 2 percent of the world’s electricity, but that is expected to reach 8 percent by 2030. Moreover, only about 6 percent of all data ever created is in active use today, according to research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means 94 percent is sitting in a vast “landfill” with a massive carbon footprint…”