Electric Gremlin@trysdyn@electric.marf.space
I've been fed "If everyone did this tiny thing for the environment, we'd solve all our problems" crap my entire life. All the way back to kids TV networks telling you to turn off lights when you leave the room and we'll save 4-fuckbillion tons of coal a year.
And yes you should do things like that, when they're actually going to have an impact. Turning off lights when you don't need them is a small thing with an equally small impact.
But it doesn't hold a candle to things like coal reliance, LLM datacenters, etc etc. We're not going to get anywhere until we somehow tackle the big problems, and our energy should be going to making people who can do that, do that.
Electric Gremlin@trysdyn@electric.marf.space
Anyway while "Deleting emails saves water" is definitely the most asinine one of these I've seen, there's been one of these in the zeitgeist since basically the 80s, and probably longer-- but I can only personally vouch for so long.
When I lived in California we'd go on water restrictions every year where they'd say "Limit your showers to 10 minutes" and one day I looked up how much that actually saves.
It wouldn't be enough to run a single kale farm. You know how much water you need to grow kale in a desert? Yeah.
It's all bullshit. The problem's systemic.