By Mark Jones
Each month, I email this column to the editor of Design World. It is the way we communicate and the way I communicate with many others. So, an article quantifying the human mortality cost of email signatures caught my attention. I dug in, curious to find how email leads to death.
The paper, “The unexpected reason firms should institute policies to remove email signatures: Quantifying human mortality costs of email signature-based reputation signaling” by Joshua M. Pearce, is a detailed estimation of greenhouse gas emissions caused by pronouns in an email signature. The analysis was done for Canada. The “1,000-ton rule” was used to estimate people killed, a person per year for Canadian pronouns.
I’d never heard of the 1,000-ton rule. Investigating it led to some sobering realizations and introduced me to some strange new units. The 1,000-ton rule asserts, “A future person is killed every time 1,000 tons of fossil carbon are burned.” Something I do today — burn carbon — leads to a death. Lots of assumptions go into this, not the least of which is defining death. Everyone will eventually die, and the likelihood of death increases with age. The 1,000-ton rule uses premature death. It links emissions today with someone, somewhere in the future, dying sooner than they otherwise would have had it not been for today’s emissions. It relies on estimating the number of temperature-related deaths globally in the future, deaths that would have been delayed at 2020 temperatures. Deaths below the expected age today would be characterized as premature, a future person killed.
I made the mistake of checking my own life expectancy. Six years from now was the first answer retrieved from the internet. Not the answer I wanted. Thankfully, the Social Security Administration provides a Longevity Visualizer. It provided a more comforting 19 year estimate and provided a visualization of the skewed-left distribution of death by age. Some people die at the center of the distribution, but nearly 50% of all deaths are premature. Nearly 50% live longer than average. There is a lot of slop.
On top of the slop in the definition of a death, there is slop in the estimation of future temperatures. At best, the 1,000-ton rule is an order of magnitude or so estimate.
Every byte we send takes energy. Energy comes from burning fuels, releasing carbon. The tiny, tiny impact of a signature on an individual email, when multiplied by the number of emails bearing pronouns, becomes significant. Only 15% of Canadians put pronouns in email signatures, yet this adds up to a future death per year by application of the 1,000-ton rule.
The 1,000-ton rule is for carbon emissions. That’s 3,700 tons of CO2. Data on per capita emissions across my lifetimeindicate I’m responsible for lifetime emissions of 1,230 tons of CO2, 335 tons of carbon. I’m strangely relieved my emissions haven’t killed a future person yet. Based on my life expectancy, I will not make 1,000 tons in my lifetime. Further, all of my outgoing email activity is a near negligible part of my footprint, an email signature even less. Incoming email, dominated by mail I don’t really want and rarely read, still isn’t a big part of my personal footprint, but it is far more significant.
Pearce’s paper points out inclusion of any number of other things, like useless FAX numbers, long disclaimers and logos all come at some cost. Nearly 50% of all emails are spam. Given the numbers used by Pearce, global spam is responsible for at least 259 million tons of CO2 emissions and is going to be responsible for over 70,000 future deaths per year.
The mortality cost of email signatures reminds us that even small actions have consequences. Small things add up. Reputation signaling in email signatures feels like a strange place to start. There are so many other things wrong with the email ecosystem. If I were granted the ability to fix one thing with email, pronouns in email signatures would be pretty far down my list. Spam is a bigger target. It is a current scourge and, as the analysis of email signatures indicates, will have consequences long after it is deleted.
Filed Under: Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking
