Ariel Hahn, a librarian friend, wrote an essay* about the damage to the climate caused by cloud storage for libraries and archives. She wasn’t giving solutions so much as suggesting it was a problem to begin thinking about and finding solutions for.
I mentioned to my wife and tech expert that I would never put anything on the cloud because I’m alarmed by the amount of energy, water and space it consumes and she said, “Baby, everything you do is on the cloud and automatically uploaded every day.”
One thing I was storing on the cloud was 9,689 items in my recycle bin because I didn’t even know that I was supposed to empty it—so obviously you would not want to take any of my advice on computer stuff. But I did find out it takes a million times more energy to save data to the cloud than on a hard drive.
“While we often refer to data storage as being ‘on the cloud’ it’s actually not the case – when you decide to save a file using data storage, your information is then stored in massive buildings filled with hard drives. These hard drives have to be running at all times in the event that you want to retrieve the files you’ve saved via data storage – contributing to the extensive electricity usage used by data storage.
A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. An assessment at a conference of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reached a lower number: 3.1 kWh per gigabyte. (A gigabyte is enough data to save a few hundred high-resolution photos or an hour of video.)
Compared with your personal hard disk, which requires about 0.000005 kWh per gigabyte to save your data, this is a huge amount of energy. Saving and storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of CO2, based on the usual U.S. electric mix.” **
Then I looked into the question of that annoying AI answer that pops up every time I google and found out that AI answering a question uses 10 times as much energy as regular googling. It’s very relaxing not to see it and it’s still available on the bar. If you want to stop it being the first answer to every search, you can find out how to do that here.
I also checked out the carbon footprint of the Talking Pictures blog. I got a grade of C.
I decided to go to WordPress and take out my saved drafts and revisions. It’s not possible. Until recently a person answered questions. Now it is AI.
AI: “That’s really thoughtful of you to consider the environmental impact! While individual post revisions don’t significantly affect server energy usage, I understand wanting to be mindful.
If you’re interested in broader environmental impact, WordPress.com actually runs on renewable energy and has sustainability initiatives in place. Your site’s overall energy footprint is already quite optimized.
For now, you can just exit the revisions screen – the system will continue managing those revisions efficiently. Is there anything else about your site you’d like help with?”
I don’t doubt that WordPress has tried to store more efficiently and offset their power usage with green energy but take Ohio for example: three coal fired power plants that were scheduled to shut down have had to remain open to meet electricity demand. There are 200 data storage centers in Ohio. And, btw, there are 56 in NYC and 114 in NYS.
One point that Ariel Hahn makes is that individual initiatives (like mine) won’t make an appreciable difference. Only collective action can sway governments and corporations to change. It’s a great point, but for years I have heard many people make this argument about all kinds of efforts to save the environment — to recycle, to compost, to turn down the heat, to drive less, etc., but I don’t quite understand it. Aren’t the people who do make those efforts the ones most likely to vote responsibly and support collective action?
I know I’m not off the cloud. My blog is on it, my painting website is on it. But I cleaned my cloud up a little bit.
—CNQ
*Refusing Growth: Cloud Technology, Climate Change, and the Future of Libraries and Archives by Ariel Hahn, in Land in Libraries, edited by Lydia Zvyagintseva and Mary Greenshields, Library Juice Press, 2023
**Carbon and the Cloud: Hard facts about data storage.
May/June, 2017, Stanford Magazine
The Hidden Cost of the Cloud by Diyaz Yakubov on Medium, February 2025
What’s the Carbon Footprint of Your Website?
by Sarah-Indra Jungblut, June 2024
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