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United Kingdom Earth Science

UK Government Suggests Deleting Files To Save Water (theverge.com) 119

Posted by msmash from the ctrl-alt-del-the-drought dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Can deleting old emails and photos help the UK tackle ongoing drought this year? That's the hope, according to recommendations for the public included in a press release today from the National Drought Group.

There are far bigger steps companies and policymakers can take to conserve water of course, but drought has gotten bad enough for officials to urge the average person to consider how their habits might help or hurt the situation. And the proliferation of data centers is raising concerns about how much water it takes to power servers and keep them cool.

"Simple, everyday choices -- such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails -- also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife," Helen Wakeham, Environment Agency Director of Water, said in the press release.

UK Government Suggests Deleting Files To Save Water More | Reply

UK Government Suggests Deleting Files To Save Water

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  • The Donald has done his share (Score:5, Funny)

    by courteaudotbiz ( 1191083 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:03PM (#65585548) Homepage
    Deleting the Epstein files...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bjoast ( 1310293 )
      Yeah, but he did it to save his ass.

  • Pretty sure (Score:3)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:10PM (#65585568) Homepage

    Pretty sure a single drive could store most of the UK's email throughout history, minus some particularly large emails with attachments.

    • Re:Pretty sure (Score:5, Informative)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @05:33PM (#65585834) Journal

      Fuck's sake.

      Look, ok, our PM is a former human rights lawyer (somehow) who has done a 180 into being a massive authoritarian who has more or less by his own admission no guiding principles. And the number of engineers in the cabinet is... 0.

      • That's to be expected because the UK is in decline. Engineers and scientists know how to build new things but when it comes to shutting things down you need lawyers.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Fuck's sake.

        Look, ok, our PM is a former human rights lawyer (somehow) who has done a 180 into being a massive authoritarian who has more or less by his own admission no guiding principles. And the number of engineers in the cabinet is... 0.

        Yep, the big problem is Labour isn't being Labour. They're still trying to be Tory Lite when it's full sugar Tory that got us into this mess.

        I voted Labour and are happy they got in as another 5 years of Tory fuckery would have been worse, but now they need to change to fix the issues. Trying to be Tory but only 1 calorie of Tory isn't going to fix anything, it'll just make the problem worse at a slower rate.

        The problem is, with the possible exception of the Lib Dems, all the other options are worse t

        • This is all interesting...

          I haven't the faintest idea what a "Tory" or "Labour" is.....

        • Yep, the big problem is Labour isn't being Labour. They're still trying to be Tory Lite when it's full sugar Tory that got us into this mess.

          It's not just that, Starmer is bereft of any principles or direction.

          I voted Labour and are happy they got in as another 5 years of Tory fuckery would have been worse, but now they need to change to fix the issues. Trying to be Tory but only 1 calorie of Tory isn't going to fix anything, it'll just make the problem worse at a slower rate.

          I did not (safe Labour seat),

  • OK, in SOME situations file storage has an ongoing energy cost, but if the storage is local and the drive isn't anywhere near full,* any energy savings will be somewhere between zero and too small to measure.

    I can see a small-but-measurable benefit if you are talking data-center-scale storage: If you cut storage needs by 1%, you will need to have 1% fewer drives or SSD drawing power at any given time, but IMHO it's not worth the effort.

    *If the drive is nearly full, you (the user) may go out and buy a bigge

    • If millions of people deleted a lot of emails, maybe the local data centres could run fewer servers, with less data that needs to be online, smaller indexes to search.
      Deleting files from your local drive makes no difference, they're not even water cooled from local rivers. But keeping more servers running in data centres to handle demand does

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

      Remember, it's always the little folks at fault for the ruin of the world.

      I mean, just look at them; disgusting!

  • Enshitification (Score:5, Insightful)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:12PM (#65585578)

    Ok, I’m getting old.
    I’ve noticed the decay of logical thought process from politicians especially over the last 10 years.
    For example, in Victoria Australia, the state government just paid a small fortune to place dozens of Machete amnesty bins around the city. I honestly thought it was an AI joke, yet they can’t afford to replace rural fire trucks.
    As an engineer, it’s infuriating how ideology increasingly rules over logical thought process, and in the case of this article, complete nonsense makes its way into the public discourse.

    • Re:Enshitification (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bjoast ( 1310293 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:31PM (#65585632)
      The important thing for a politician is to be shown to do something. It doesn't matter if this something has effect or not. A performative activity that resembles a solution is often enough, and it's especially good if it keeps other politicians, legal consultants, and compliance auditors employed for at least the next few years.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Think it through. Where are most people's emails stored? Data centres, aka The Cloud. What do data centres use a lot of? Water.

      If you delete old emails, it reduces the amount of storage needed for your account, which reduces the amount of spinning rust and powered up SSDs. When you search your emails, it reduces the amount of energy needed to sift through them.

      All of which reduces water consumption.

      • If you delete old emails, it reduces the amount of storage needed for your account, which reduces the amount of spinning rust and powered up SSDs.

        Only if the data centers reduce their storage capacity proportionally by taking drives offline, which they generally won't. Of course, politicians being politicians, what they probably meant was that by deleting files you'll help keep the situation from getting worse.

        If they really wanted to tell people to do something that would cut data center power consumption significantly, they'd ask people to stop using AI tools.

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The volume of data is constantly growing, so it's more a case of it increasing more slowly.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Only if the data centers reduce their storage capacity proportionally by taking drives offline

          They won't. Even if everyone deletes email the total usage will still increase.

          Even if the storage requirements decrease; They'll just allocate that capacity to more AI training. AI training and CPU is your big energy consumer and heat producer not storage.

      • Sorry, but that's bullshit. People's personal emails are not a significant consumer of datacenter resources.

        • People's personal emails are not a significant consumer of datacenter resources.

          No, but I bet the AI's that use those emails as training data are a very significant consumer and, if you are a clueless politician that makes it our fault for leaving all that data around for AI training purposes.

        • I was wondering the same. I am an early gmail user. I do not delete messages as it is very convenient if you need to look something up afterwards. Is my vacuum cleaner still in waranty? Let's search for the invoice in my mailbox.
          So my mailbox has grown to several gigabytes. I imagine google needs water to cool the server that stores my emails.If we all start deleting our mails, less harddrives are needed, less heat is generated and less water is needed. (I am no expert, this is what I get if I think this

        • Sorry, but that's bullshit. People's personal emails are not a significant consumer of datacenter resources.

          And the light in my bathroom is only 8W, but I still turn it off when I'm not using it. Yes, asking people to delete emails to save the people is twee verging on cringeworthy, but as the man who pissed in the sea said, "every little helps".

      • Yes. Think it through. Where are old files stored? In Cold storage. That's usually still tape. Or some device not currently running. My 5 year old videos don't use any power or water or anything but physical space in a rack if I just leave them there.

        However, Moving it to hot space, processing and deleting it, creating a changed copy for backup or cold storage... Consumes Power energy and water.

        "is it stored in a data center and what do data center use" is the same logic of "witches swim and what also does

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          They don't store old emails in tape, because people expect to be able to access them instantly.

          • Then move them to archive HDDs that don't spin up until needed?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Even the few seconds that HDDs take to spin up is too much. They use online storage for emails, at least for consumers.

              Some businesses have contracts for nearline storage, archives for old email, but not consumer services.

              Photos are the same, all kept within less than 1 second of being able to access.

              • What's the point (from the host perspective) of cheaper archive storage if it isn't also slower? Amazon doesn't say it flat out (that I've seen), but the documentation around Glacier sure implies that those drives aren't always spinning. Google would be acting foolishly if they keep spinning the drives holding my emails from twenty years ago. It takes less time to spin up a drive than it does for me to navigate that far back.

                You may be completely right. I'd just be shocked to find out that these compa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by modecx ( 130548 )

        I'm amused that you think when you hit the delete button on an email hosted on a cloud account like Gmail that it actually means it has been deleted.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It's the UK. We have GDPR, and the threat of big fines if they lie about it.

        • Pretty sure google deletes it permanently. Plenty of data, a few mails less won't matter. Want your emails back? You will have to ask the NSA.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        .. All of which reduces water consumption.

        So what? The water reduction COULD be utterly insignificant. A better proposal might be stop taking showers, and stop taking baths - or only take baths a maximum time of once a week. Drink less water. Turn your pets in to be converted into hotdog meat, or just stop having pets in general, because cats and dogs consume water. Wear your clothes over again for at least 3 times before washing.. etc

        Deleting emails impacts your data preservation - the

      • I don't think anyone's arguing that there aren't resources required to keep old emails, just that they're utterly insignificant.

        If we assume that every single one of the 80 million people in the UK has 3GB of deleteable emails somewhere in the cloud, we're talking about 240 PB of data. Let's multiply that by a factor of 4 for replication, indexing, and whatever else I haven't considered, and then round it up to a nice even 1000 PB (1 exabyte) of data.

        A top-loader 4U storage server can take 90 drives at

    • This isn't enshittification, this is you thinking your pet political issue trumps another pet political issue (note I agree with you in this case, rural firetrucks are probably more important) but you clearly haven't given this the slightest thought. Here's some logical thinking you yourself are missing:

      a) The Australian government banned machetes. We have a long history of secure amnesty delivery working in the country. This program is a copy of the policy that eliminated mass shootings in Australia, just

    • Sounds more like enpussification

  • Better Idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:13PM (#65585580)

    I have a better idea: stop building the completely unnecessary data centers (I'd estimate that 99.99% of them are unnecessary), and abolish the stupid-ass AI-scam centers that are destroying water supplies. They are beyond useless and pointless.

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      stupid-ass AI-scam centers that are destroying water supplies

      Use smart-ass AI-scam centers with AI-controlled closed-loop or non-water-cooling systems so they don't destroy the water supplies. :)

      Oh, yeah, another rule: The AI-scam-center only gets to use electricity it produces on-site without destroying the environment (solar, wind, maybe tidal, geothermal, etc. but nothing polluting). And even another rule: It only gets to network with itself, not the outside world.

      • Re:Better Idea (Score:4, Funny)

        by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:39PM (#65585660)

        stupid-ass AI-scam centers that are destroying water supplies

        Use smart-ass AI-scam centers with AI-controlled closed-loop or non-water-cooling systems so they don't destroy the water supplies. :)

        Oh, yeah, another rule: The AI-scam-center only gets to use electricity it produces on-site without destroying the environment (solar, wind, maybe tidal, geothermal, etc. but nothing polluting). And even another rule: It only gets to network with itself, not the outside world.

        Just spitballing here, but I think the best way to power AI scam centers would be to power them via the hot-air produced by the AI prophet crowd. Imagine if you could harness the energy produced via Sam Altman's prodigious prognostications alone? Hells, that could probably solve every energy crisis for us for the next century!

      • That's... got to be embarrassing for the administration.

        "Build more datacenters! Build MORE datacenters!"

        "Uh-oh... Delete your emails as we pretend this wasn't our idea!"

    • Exactly, StormReaver!
      Deleting emails isn't going to cut back on the amount of water used to cool the server rack. What will save on the amount of water used to cool that server rack is turning it off!
      Do we really need "AI" (actually, just a predictive text engine that can put words into a semblance of a sentence)? If you need to code something, maybe do the work yourself! If you want to know a fact, you can search the 'net or get a book! That kind of thing has worked for over a hundred years... I don't

    • Re:Better Idea (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @05:49PM (#65585898) Homepage
      Any hope of saving water by deleting emails was just wiped out by one person asking AI how to delete emails.

    • It's necessary for all workloads to be triply-redundant because oh no what if the server went down for a few minutes?!

    • > stop building the completely unnecessary data centers (I'd estimate that 99.99% of them are unnecessary),

      99.99% of statistics are just numbers pulled out from somebody's arse

    • How do they "destroy water supplies"? Are they so hot that water is instantly split into hydrogen and oxygen? Or is it just warmed up? Hot water hasn't been destroyed or polluted, it's just hot. Hell, it should still be potable! Worst case, slap a filter or distiller on the outflow and run it straight back into the municipal water supply.

    • Without all of those data centers, how will they track you in all aspects of your life? Want to run for Congress? LOL, every action you have done or every piece of data that is generated about you takes space within the datacenters.

      Long story short, those data centers relieve the powers that be from worrying about your stupid decisions.

      Want to create a group to stand against racism? They will be more effective at silencing you now than when Martin Luther King was was silenced.

      You will never get rid of those

  • Thats stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:14PM (#65585582)

    The hard drive is going to be running in the datacenter whether you store something on it or not. Deleting the email will cause more heat, because you'll have to process the info.

    • That's what I came to say: Accessing the file to delete it uses more energy than just leaving it alone.

    • Re:Thats stupid (Score:5, Funny)

      by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @05:09PM (#65585756)

      The hard drive is going to be running in the datacenter whether you store something on it or not. Deleting the email will cause more heat, because you'll have to process the info.

      Yes, but they also said pictures. Have you never lifted a box full of photographs? Those things are heavy. One-thousand 4x6 photos weights 3 kg. Just think about how much extra energy it takes for a spinning disk with an extra 3 kg of pictures saved on it must use. According to Google 1TB can hold 25,000 to 500,000 pictures. Even on the low end, that's 1500 kg of extra weight on a 20TB spinning disk.

      It's madness I tell you

      Sincerely.

      UK government

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        SSDs store electrons (unlike HDDs which just re-orient a magnetic field), so their weight does change based on what you store on them.

        It's probably very difficult to calculate though, because you would need to know how many electrons per bit on average, and the ratio of 1s to 0s in the stored data. I bet it's not 50/50 for email, e.g. ASCII/Unicode is mostly keeping bit 7 clear for English, most letters are lowercase etc.

        Anyway, most likely an SSD gets slightly heavier as it fills up, in the order of microg

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      I think you missed the point (the point is stupid but that's no excuse for missing it). The point is not the HDD currently running, the point is that next email which causes an additional HDD to be added.

      A great amount of our cloud storage in datacentres is dedicated to shit we'll never need or use and storage requirements in datacentres keep going up, they keep getting bigger, and they keep building more.

      • Yeah, but data storage doesn't hold a candle to AI. A better thing to do is say make sure you only use AI for what you need to. An even better thing to say would be, lets change the policies to stop water usage with datacenters and use tech that uses little or no water for cooling (it exists).

        • No one claims it did. What the claim here is, is the same as every other climate change issue. Lots of small cases do add up and having idiots come out with the "but China!" or in this case "but AI" is nothing more than a stupid argument to do nothing.

          AI may well be a fad, data storage is not.

          lets change the policies to stop water usage with datacenters and use tech that uses little or no water for cooling (it exists).

          It does. And it has multiple problems. In cases where openloop cooling is possible it is a potentially good solution but then you're guggling the local ecological impact with other infrastructure issues (e.g. do you ha

  • .. ai search answer, in any way?

    Because, just from the sound of it, it sounds like non-sense or just
    "sh-AI-t"

  • My solution... (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:19PM (#65585598) Journal
    I ran a dedupe on my drive and eliminated 8 redundant copies of the goatse guy.

    #SaveWaterWithGoatse
  • In World War II there was a drive [londongardenstrust.org],in the UK, to collect old iron objects for melting into war material. The purpose was not to obtain metal but to manipulate the people.

  • Whensocial media iinfiltrates govt agencies... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Felix Baum ( 6314928 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:41PM (#65585668)
    It's very worrying because actual employees at the Environment Agency have read some social media articles about US data centers using water and extrapolated it to the UK without doing any research. Something like 95% of data centers in the UK are using air-cooled chillers for cooling. Zero water is being used in that case. A lot of sites use adiabatic cooling for cooling towers, spray for closed-loop air-cooled chillers, or adiabatic CRAH units, in my experience. A lot of that is recycled and reused.

    • Errr do you realise that adiabatic CRAH units actually have nothing to do with how cooling is achieved on the datacentre and everything to do with the internal loop. No one is complaining about that. Even adiabatic CRAH units typically rely on evaporative cooling (as do several others you list). This is precisely where the water waste comes from - the air chillers outside. They don't just use air as that is insanely inefficient.

      Sites that don't waste water ironically are not air cooled but typically open lo

  • ... to get Prince Andrew's [wikipedia.org] files deleted?

  • How about.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by strUser_Name ( 7991504 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:51PM (#65585698)
    ..arresting 30 British citizens a day less for saying something that doesn't adhere to government orthodoxy. I'd bet that would save a lot more.

    • Then those citizens would be free to have longer showers wasting even more water. Jessssus man think a bit before you speak! -This is sarcasm guys.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Serif ( 87265 )

      Or maybe not leveraging debt on the assets of a privatised national resource to pay huge bonuses and dividends, and instead using some of that money to upgrade infrastructure, build reservoirs, and fix leaks?

  • Duck and cover (Score:3)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:58PM (#65585724)

    Duck and cover. That one weird little trick you can do to defeat the A-bomb. Thank goodness for all those civil servants hard at work to govern you in the way that is best for you.

  • is like turning off the faucet to brush your teeth while 100 acres of farmland a few miles away are watered three times a day

  • From the comments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shakes Fist ( 10502847 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @05:07PM (#65585752)
    As posted in the comments:

    instead of blaming the rest of us, we:

    - Build some new reservoirs (none built in the last 30 years, despite massive population growth and the fact we were already having hosepipe bans 30 years ago).
    - Regulate against building data centres that take away our drinking water (doesn't have to mean they can't exist - they could build their own water supplies).
    - Tax datacentre owners on their water usage, and use that money to fund water infrastructure improvements, like fixing the ridiculous number of leaky water pipes we currently have across the country.
    • Why not just return the water to the system? It's not sewage, it's just warmer.

      And you really don't need to tax them for using something they are already paying for. Water customers in the UK are billed for what they use, right?

  • Okay then, Miss Wakeman, *how much* energy will it save if I delete 1 MB of emails ?

    And if it is indeed totally negligible and you are talking shit, will you resign ?

  • What we should do is train a specific AI model so that CoPilot can do this automatically. /s

  • What if we deleted all email old then 1-year? Seriously! The number of "inboxes" I've dealt with that are 10, 20, 30, 40+ GB, going back 10+ years, is comical, and sad. I have worked for people who brag about having 10+ years of email, swear on their life they need all of it, just in case, and then will ask me a question already answered in an email a week prior, it’s ridiculous. If you got rid of 99.999999% of all emails that have been stored, I bet no one would miss or notice.

    Ignoring email,

    • I copied your post into ChatGPT to get its reaction, and maybe waste a little water:

      You’re raising a point that’s part digital minimalism, part data ethics, and part environmental sustainability — and it’s a bigger deal than most people realize.

      Here’s the reality:

      1. The Hoarding Problem
      You’re right — most people will never touch 99% of their stored data.

      Emails: Studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that after a year, the chance of revisiting messages drops to near

  • What everyone does not seem to realize, is that MNAY of the choices we are making to "save the climate" are equally stupid. They are just less obviously stupid.

  • This is just another version of recycling (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @06:18PM (#65586004)
    A complete bit of bullshit nonsense to make you feel like something is being done about the droughts and other impacts of climate change that have become too noticeable to pretend don't exist.

    Also the United Kingdom like every country on the planet wants to open up as many data centers to run AI to replace employees as fast as they possibly can and those things guzzle water. They don't need to before everybody jumps all over me but they absolutely do guzzle the water even if they don't need to.

    We're all going to lose our jobs (including the plumbers since who the fuck is going to hire those plumbers when we are all unemployed) and we're going to lose our jobs to an AI that gets the water and electricity we used to enjoy.

    But at least we will see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. What an achievement!
  • Don't take so many pictures at all. Do you really need pictures of every meal and place that you go?

  • Throwing all of the computers in the rivers would raise the water levels!

  • Drought in the UK (Score:4, Funny)

    by RUs1729 ( 10049396 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @07:20PM (#65586138)
    A drought in the UK is what in most other locations in the world is called slightly wet weather. That's why they have never invested in water-storage mechanisms - things like reservoirs and dams. As a result, when their weather is damp and miserable only fifteen days a month, rather than the usual twenty plus, they go panicky and complain that they have a 'drought'.

  • Mark the clueless government as spam instead (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @01:21AM (#65586648)
    Nothing says "out of touch" like suggesting virtue signal, performative, worthless chores and manufacturing consent for a fake moral shaming of individuals who don't recycle or delete email hard enough as some personal failing when it's the politicians and the corporations who are the ones cheating and causing massive harm to the planet.

  • It will not save any water, but it will make it easier to deny that there ever was water.

  • Not only would you sequester carbon as paper, but you would also have access to your emails forever! If you needed to share an email, you could make a photocopy, which sequesters even more carbon. The UK needs to do its part in stopping global climate change.

  • No, it hasn't (Score:3)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @07:49AM (#65586874) Homepage Journal

    There are far bigger steps companies and policymakers can take to conserve water of course, but drought has gotten bad enough for officials to urge the average person to consider how their habits might help or hurt the situation.

    No, the average person deleting their emails will make fuck-all difference compared to changes in industrial processes, so it really hasn't. It's political theater, and also victim-blaming.

  • Can't we cool servers with sewage water? Seems appropriate. Plenty of sewage anyway.

  • Whether there is more or less data on a storage device does not impact its power consumption at all.

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