Email

The convenience¹ of email inspires a huge bias in favor of email (and likely confirmation bias to a large extent). But if you can detach from the tyranny of convenience and look at email critically, it does not look like such an obvious best choice ecologically. Consider these inconvenient facts:

Google’s support for fossil fuels is probably the most notable problem. Microsoft is even worse than Google (see item 11). Even if you are the rare netizen who uses an ethical email provider, probably over 95% of your email traffic is with a gmail or outlook user. Nearly all corporations and gov agencies are using Microsoft for email service but it’s masked by their vanity addresses. Of course PGP is not an option for ~95+% of your email traffic, so MS and Google profit from your traffic in both directions because it all feeds their advertising networks. From there, the ads fuel consumerism, leading to more purchases of shit that takes a toll on the environment.

So how good is email for the environment when you take all factors into account?

I restricted the dirt above to ecocide as this is a climate forum, but once you also account for non-environmental factors like privacy abuses, MS and Google are a clear non-starter.

¹ I use “convenience” more loosely than justified because email is very inconvenient for some of us, like people who run their own mail servers in order to not needlessly feed extra 3rd parties. The anti-spammers have really ruined the convenience and availability of email by going to extremes that impose colatteral damage on legit email. So it’s not really fair to call email convenient any longer.

Fax

A fax can be sent without printing. Your letter just needs to be formatted for US letter or A4 and in a raster graphic. More often than not, the receiving side is a service that attaches the letter to an email and sends it to the recipient, who likely uses Microsoft.

The pros:

  • You can withhold your email address from the letter, thus preventing an email reply (which would then feed the MS ad network and lead to more purchases).
  • MS must work harder to snoop and OCR the raster image. But do they? Idk. If they do, it would expend more energy. But if they don’t, the msg avoids feeding the ad network.

The cons:

  • The electronic payload is more bulky, thus uses more energy per msg.

Paper letters

Paper must be used, but the paper industry has trended toward sustainabilty and some regions have a mandate on recycling paper (yes, it is illegal to toss recyclable paper in with other waste in wise parts of the world). Unprinting has made progress, which would enable you to erase toner from a page to reuse it.

When a recipient in my city uses Google or Microsoft for email and they have no fax number, I print my correspondence on paper and cycle to their mailbox. It’s a way of saying fuck you to the giant surveillance advertisers. And because all kinds of tech rights and ethics are being pissed on by Google and MS in addition to their environmental abuses, this approach is the clear winner for me.

It’s not exactly obvious which choice is the least harmful for the environment without research that really dissects it and looks at the nuts and bolts of it. But I conjecture that if enough people were to switch back to fax and paper letters and cause inconvenience for Microsoft & Google recipients, it would drive them to choose more ethical email providers in order to esacape the burden of scanning paper and then the cost of paying the postal service to carry their reply. This ultimately favors a more sustainable path even if it’s taking a step backwards in order to take more steps forwards.