📲 Deleting Your Photos On Your Phone Could Save Water!

People in the UK are being asked to delete old photos and emails from the cloud to help tackle a water shortage.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jersey and Amanda gam Nation. Do you have lots of
old photos on your phone?

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:06):
We all do, don't we?

Speaker 2 (00:08):
And you go through from time to time and scroll
through and delete the ones.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Do you, yep?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I get rid of shots?

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Do you ones that I'm not going to use? Use for? What? Though?
I just ones that I've got pictures of that. It's
so funny because do we all remember the photos that
we've got. I don't think we do it. It's just
a storage facility really on your phone. And this is
what I think is interesting is the UK government is
asking people to get rid of their photos and older
emails to help tackle a water shortage. You wouldn't think

(00:35):
that that would correlate with an environmental crisis. It's been
described as a nationally significant incident five areas in the
UK officially and drought. And what they're saying is that
all of your stuff is stored up in the cloud
and it's the cloud that needs water to cool those
computers that are taking up all this water. Have a listen.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Whatever you store something up in the cloud, it requires
complete and computer servers to save that. Those servers generate heat.
That heat needs to be called somehow They oftentimes use
water to cool the servers.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Some data centers use up to nineteen million liters of
water a day. That's the same as about fifteen thousand households.
So the government, the UK government is saying by deleting
one thousand old emails with attachments could save seventy seven
liters of water. It's worth going through the phone. You'll
save space and water. But AI is really going to

(01:30):
be impacting this more and more environmental impact from AI.
Training and using large AI models requires vast amounts of electricity,
with AI workloads projected to consumingly half of all global
data center electricity by the end of twenty twenty five.
So this surge and energy use contributes to rising greenhouse

(01:50):
gas emissions, surpassing even the aviation industry, so that's quite extraordinary.
AI data centers rely heavily on water for cooling. These
figures are extraordinary in terms of water usage. AIDATA centers
in the US alone consumed seventeen billion gallons of water
in twenty twenty three, so they're extrapolating this mats so

(02:13):
it's going to be about one hundred and forty eight
billion gallons of water annually. Let me put that in
a context. One hundred and forty eight billion gallons of
water is ninety three billion flushes of a toilet, two
hundred and twenty four thousand Olympic sized pools. This is
what's being used annually, three hundred and forty three thousand
football fields. This water would supply New York City with

(02:36):
water for five months. It's about one point eight five
billion bath tubs and pretty much the equivalent of my
ankle water. Okay, so this is a public service announcement.
If your old photos, your old emails have a cul really,
because the environmental impact is extraordinary, be a delete mynudes

(02:56):
of who to see if everything's in in peak condition,
you they need some cooling there. Well, you know what
you could do? Send it off to you. Hell, what's this?
Is that a knuckle? But you can You can send
this stuff to chat GPT and it will tell you

(03:16):
your medical information. Chat GPT is very useful, but it
also has a big downside. We'll talk about that next
in the pub test