Are pronouns killing people?
A researcher in Canada has published a paper highlighting that email usage has an impact that flows through the climate change and argues that including pronouns in email signatures is contributing to the problem.
Writing in The Conversation Professor Joshua Pearce from Western University in Ontario Canada puts forward his concerns, based on a paper he recently published in the journal Sustainable Futures.
Professor Pearce argues that, based on a rule researchers often use to calculate the cost of carbon emissions, emails are leading to premature deaths, and adding pronouns to your signature is worsening the problem.
The 1,000-ton rule is used to quantify the effects of carbon emitting technology. it says that for every 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere one person dies prematurely. The theory is often used as a framework for developing policies by decision makers.
The academic argues that sending emails is a technological process that causes carbon emissions and as emails get longer more carbon is produced. He cites Acknowledgment of Country messages and pronoun information as content that has increasingly been added to email signatures in recent years.
“In both cases, the extra carbon emissions for each email for the extra characters is estimated and aggregated over the population that uses them.” he writes in The Conversation.
“The results showed that in Canada, where about 15 per cent 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, according to the 1,000-ton rule.”
The professor however is quick to acknowledge the flaw in his clarion call, anything being added to an email will be problematic. Legal notices, details of the award your company just won, logos, and that message that says “be environmentally don’t print this email out”, would all be ramping up the amount of data being used.
In truth that colleague who writes epic emails is probably a bigger problem, and what about spam, newsletters you never read and emails thanking you for confirming you’ve done that thing that a colleague just asked you to do.
Professor Pearce asks why we even bother with signatures. We don’t sign off text messages. And your email address probably indicates who it’s from anyway… unless you’re still using that email you created in high school.
Is digital waste something we need to talk more about in the future? Probably. Are pronouns leading to deaths? Not so much.
