Email signatures are key features in many people’s day-to-day messages.
But this seemingly innocuous tool could soon be cancelled – that is, if one woke scientist has anything to do with it.
Dr Joshua Pearce, an IT professor at Western University in Canada, has dramatically claimed that email signatures are harming the planet.
In a recent study, the expert looked at the impact of including gender pronouns in email signatures.
According to his results, these additions to your sign-off could prove deadly.
Writing for The Conversation, he said: ‘In Canada, where about 15% of people include gender pronouns in emails, the resulting carbon emissions from this small change (three extra words) may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year.’
Based on the findings, Dr Pearce is calling for email signatures to be banned entirely.
‘If you receive an email with a long signature, you might consider asking the sender to switch to a hyperlink instead, or eliminate their signature all together,’ he suggested.
Email signatures are key features in many people’s day-to-day messages. But this seemingly innocuous tool could soon be cancelled – that is, if one woke scientist has anything to do with it (stock image)
According to the expert, email signatures put an extra, unnecessary strain on IT infrastructure that burn energy 24/7 to be able to operate.
This results in more energy requirements and in turn more greenhouse gas emissions.
And the longer an email, the bigger its so-called ‘carbon footprint’.
‘The environmental harm and human mortality caused by this seemingly minor digital habit is evident,’ he said.
‘We should take the easy steps of cutting wasteful energy use in our communications and it can start with eliminating email signatures.’
Dr Pearce’s study specifically looked at the environmental impact of two bits of information in email signatures – gender pronouns and land acknowledgements.
According to Inclusive Employers, gender pronouns are a way for the person receiving the email to understand the preferred way for them to address you.
But some critics have described adding gender pronouns to your email signature as ‘jumping on the woke bandwagon’.
According to the expert’s research, email signatures put an extra, unnecessary strain on IT infrastructure that burn energy 24/7 to be able to operate (stock image)
Similarly, Dr Pearce points out that historically, gender pronouns would’ve been seen ‘largely as unnecessary as people’s genders could be determined from their names’.
Meanwhile, land acknowledgements notes of the second most recent people to occupy a territory claimed by violence – are becoming more common in email signatures from senders in the US, Canada and Australia.
‘It has become fashionable in some corporate and academic circles to reputation signal by amending pronouns and/or land acknowledgements to email signatures,’ Dr Pearce says in his paper.
The researchers analysed the additional carbon emissions resulting from the extra characters resulting from gender pronouns and land acknowledgements.
It referred to the ‘1,000-ton rule’, which estimates that for every 1,000 tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere, one person dies prematurely.
According to the results, adding only three words to emails to identify gender (e.g. they/them/their) may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year.
Extra information in emails has ‘environmental and social impacts including climate-related human mortality’, the academic says
Likewise, if Canadians all used land acknowledgements in their emails roughly 30 people would be ‘sacrificed annually’, Dr Pearce says.
The academic claims that email signatures are largely ‘redundant’, as we tend to email the same people repeatedly and our name is at the top anyway.
He also takes aim at even larger blocks of information at the end of emails, such as lengthy legal disclaimers, as well as attachments, images and logos.
He adds: ‘Images and logos, which contain even larger amounts of data, cause more emissions and deaths still.’
Lastly, he also points to the ongoing issue of spam emails – unsolicited and unwanted junk email sent out in bulk often by bots.
‘Spam accounts for over half of all emails and, despite having lower carbon emissions per email (since many are deleted without being opened), spam accounts for far more emissions-producing data,’ Dr Pearce adds.
His warning comes shortly after a study by OVO Energy found that the millions of unnecessary messages sent every day are pumping thousands of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
This is all down to the power they consume, and contributes more than 23,000 tonnes of carbon a year to the UK’s footprint.
While emails are an integral form of communication, if we all cut back on just one ‘thank you’ email per day could save over 16,000 tonnes of carbon a year.
This is the equivalent of 81,152 flights from London to Madrid or taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road.
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .