zenex

[zenex]

Making the world greener one shady fact at a time.

They say you are never too old to learn and this week my corporate internal marketing stormtroopers actually blew me away from my feet. 

I was in a fancy, cheeky way challenged to ‘simplify’ my digital signature in my professional email. Their logic was simpel, if about 2000 email users would remove pictures, logo’s, links to Twitter or LinkedIn from their signature we could save up to 9 tonnes of CO2.

I had to sit down from this one. I didn’t even had the time to contemplate why we would go back into time and reduce functionalities we have freely available now 2021. 

Because reading even further I learned as wel that a spam mail was about 0,3gr of CO2, a normal email without attachments 4 gr and with an attachment of 1 MB is would be 11 gr of CO2. As much as a small plastic bag it stated...

To top it of I was informed that a ‘large’ email with ’attachments’ would even take up 50gr of CO2. 

I was speechless. The mail to point out I’m a polluter with my ‘fancy’ signature made me painfully aware somebody had to sacrifice releasing 11gr of CO2 to get me straight. Sent to about 20.000 users. You do the math.  

Never the less....I think I just discovered the plastic paradox. The world is saved. We can all smile to our children now. We, generation X have solved the puzzle....

I need to work on my sarcasm skills...my inner IT Jedi was severely triggered by such green populism. 

Being an ‘IT guy’ for more then 25 years, it is obvious these caveman from communication clearly do not understand the straight up magic behind a cloud, how an email is sent and more importantly...on how many devices we are sending and receiving these emails and at wat cost and effort. 

Even more, this opened up an old wound I got several months ago when I had a brief discussion with a high level engineer (who managed to get into a C-level) on how servers and IT are more and more energy consuming and we should think about getting our IT green again. He made a point on ‘again’! More performant applications, more storage equals more energy consumption...right? 

Remembering the vast consumption of power I needed to fire up a 256 MB hard drive on an AS/400 only a small decade ago, and seeing I can fit 256 Terra in my pocket know I just could not agree on that statement. Normally I would just ‘OK’ the situation and move on. Pick your fights but in this case I could go on for days with more of these examples. My Smartwatch has better performance, functionalities and innovation compared to freaking Windows 15 years ago and my PC running old school Windows could heat up a whole room. 

But we need to be green ‘again’...

Like I wrote, it was a brief discussion. It is a lost effort in trying to learn a monkey how to catch fish if he only wants to eat banana’s. 

Of course I went after the details of these CO2 calculations. Very curious how they came to these conclusions. I guess a smart engineer made some assumptions and the rest of the monkey’s in the tree just wanted a banana as well. The fact that I did not get a proper reply after a week already makes me smile...shit....somebody factchecked us...damn...what do we do? 

For me, it would have been the same thing if Tesla tomorrow states that they want to be a greener company so they increased the windscreen wiper interval from 2 to 3 seconds and they saved up to 1 km of battery power over a year. Making the world a greener place. One bullshit at the time. 

Make no mistake, all the green aficionados are already dancing naked in perfect clear rain with such news. Twitter would explode and Instagram follows. Hail to the banana. I’m wondering how many CO2 a tweet would be. Or is that a fart? 

Zenex