Save the 🌎: Delete your Stuff!

Alright folks, it's Earth Day, and I got one quick tip for you that can really help out the planet today, and that is delete. your stuff. Uh-huh. Seriously. Delete your stuff. Delete your stuff. Delete it. Just make it go away. Delete it all. Delete your stuff. You got emails from elementary school? Go delete them You got blurry photos from that time you decided it was a good idea to put a unicorn horn on your cat? Go delete them. You don't need them. You got slides from a talk at a conference you didn't even like that you went to 10 years ago, uh then delete them. You got a Dropbox from your middle school days that only has videos from those failed science experiments for the science fair?

Get rid of it. Delete it. You're not using it. You haven't touched it in decades. You should get rid of it. So why should you go delete your stuff? Well think about it. If you have a box of photos, you know, like the ones that I have right here. uh that are kept in your closet, then they're just sitting there gathering dust in your closet. It doesn't I don't I don't have to plug the box in. There's there's nothing to be powered here. Um all the energy that was expended to create these photos has already been done. There's no additional energy that needs to be added to them. It's the same if I were to put them on a hard drive instead, like and have them live there. Uh

but when you store photos and other files on the cloud, you require constant energy use And constant water use to cool the servers that, you know, store all that data. And the International Energy Association estimated In 2024, the the j electricity generation for global data centers approximately was around 182 million tons of CO2 emissions. That's a lot of emissions. That's even more than what the airline industry uses. And also, the same agency estimated that they were responsible for 560 billion billion liters of water consumption. assumption in 2023. Those are not small figures by any means.

And so every bit of data that you store in the cloud contributes to those figures and contributes to that. carbon footprint. And so I'm not I'm not saying that you should just, you know, go back to, you know, the analog ways, um, although the film industry would probably thank you for that. Uh you know, or to like put everything you have on hard drives. There are definitely some advantages to the cloud. But what I'm saying is that honestly, if you have data that's just kind of sitting around And you're not using it, then you should clean it up. I want to be clear about one thing. I'm not here to say that individuals are the ones who have to save us from global warming through deleting

their photos. No, we definitely need additional regulations on industries. We need more transparency around the amount of carbon emissions that That certain things like data centers contribute. You know, we can totally, you can write your policymaker. You can tell them that this stuff is important to you. You can do that for Earth a day if you want. But today I just wanted to give you one thing because honestly the world feels like it's so out of control at times. This is one thing that is in your control. You can do it today. You can do it any day. You can do it anytime you like. And that is delete your stuff. And you know, give yourself that gift of cleaning up your digital clutter. You know, Mother Nature will totally appreciate it You know how mothers always love it when you clean their your room.

Well, here you go. Mother Nature will appreciate it if you clean your digital room. Hey y'all, thank you so much for watching. Please like this video and subscribe to our channel to get more like this. And then go delete more of your stuff.