I noted the other day that Britain’s government was suggesting that deleting emails and photos was a way to save water:

“Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.”

Call me a “denier” if you must, but this didn’t strike me as convincing.

Andy Masley has now looked at some numbers and compared the impact of deleting emails with another official water-saving tip:

“Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.”

Masley:

To save as much water in data centers as fixing your toilet would save, you would need to delete 1.5 billion photos, or 200 billion emails. If it took you 0.1 seconds to delete each email, and you deleted them nonstop for 16 hours a day, it would take you 723 years to delete enough emails to save the same amount of water in data centers as you could if you fixed your toilet. . . .

And then there was this:

“Avoid watering your lawn — brown grass will grow back healthy.”

Masley:

If the average British person who waters their lawn completely stopped, they would save as much water as they would if they deleted 170 million photos or 25 billion emails. A typical lawn needs about 2.4 L of water per square foot per week to stay healthy, and each square foot has about 2000 blades of grass. The average person seems to have about 2000 photos saved. Let’s assume they’re all backed up. If someone deleted all their photos, the water they would save could support 2 blades of grass on their lawn.

Or:

“Take shorter showers.”

Masley:

If you stop showering 1 minute early every day, you would save as much water as deleting 38 million photos or 5.8 billion emails.

If someone took 100 photos every single day they were alive from age zero to age 80, and at the end wanted to store all those photos in a data center, the water they use in the data center could be saved if they just stopped each shower 5 seconds earlier than normal.

Scroll on down to read a comment that Masley has received suggesting that he has been too charitable about the quality of the government’s advice.

He also adds:

On top of this, the water costs of deleting photos and emails are probably much higher than the costs of storing them for a little while, because deleting them also takes energy and water in data centers, as well as energy and water in the power plant providing electricity for your computer. To be maximally charitable, I didn’t include that water cost, but I suspect it’s extremely high compared to the cost of storage.

Data centers might also be about 10x as water efficient as the numbers I’m using, so the real numbers might actually be 10x as ridiculous.

Indeed.

Masley’s dissection of the British government’s advice is a joy to read, but I doubt if those telling Brits that this is what they should do will care. Britain’s “drought” problem (in reality, a not-building-reservoirs-at-a-time-of-strong-population-growth problem) is, of course, something that the government wants to link to the climate “crisis,” a narrative of existential doom that is, regardless of the reality of climate change, just another millenarian cult, one of the latest in a long miserable parade. One of the ways that such cults work is through finding “sin” (and thus the need to cure it) in almost everything, however insignificant. And so, keeping that old photo online is transformed from a small pleasure into an instrument of guilt, a teaching moment to keep the faithful in line.