At 404 Media, Matthew Gault was first to spot a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group offering a list of things we can do to save water. The meeting makes sense: people think of the UK as a rainy country, but an increasing number of parts of the UK are experiencing extraordinarily dry weather. This “green and pleasant England” is brown.
Last on the Group’s list of things we can do to save water at home: “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.”
I had to look up the National Drought Group. Says Water Magazine: “The National Drought Group includes the Met[eorology] Office, government, regulators, water companies, farmers, the [Canal and River Trust], angling groups and conservation experts. With further warm, dry weather expected, the NDG will continue to meet regularly to coordinate the national response and safeguard water supplies for people, agriculture, and the environment.”
For those outside the UK: its ten water companies are particular unpopular just now. Created by privatization during Margaret Thatcher’s decade as prime minister, six are being sued for £500 million for “underreporting sewage spills”. Others are being sued for overcharging 35 million household water customers. As just one example, Thames Water will raise prices by 35% over the next three years (on top of other recent rises), and expects customers to pay £7.5 billion for a new reservoir in Oxfordshire. It already has £17 billion in debt, and this week we learned environment secretary Steve Reed has made contingency plans in case the company goes bust. As George Monbiot writes at the Guardian, money that should have been invested in infrastructure went instead to shareholders. Climate change is a factor, sure, but so is poor water management.
All this being the case, the impact consumers can have by doing even the most effective things is dwarfed by the water companies’ failures. Deleting emails is not one of the most effective things.
At his The Weird Turn Pro Substack, Andy Masley provides some useful comparisons. Basic conclusion: you’d have to delete billions of emails to equal the savings of fixing your leaking toilet (if you have one). The whole thing reminds me of a while back when everyone was being told to save electricity by unplugging everything to extinguish all those standby lights. Last year, Which pointed out that the savings are really, really small.
The bizarre idea of deleting emails is coming, at least in part, from a government that is proposing a raft of technology-related legislation and wants, in the next five to ten years, to mastermind all sorts of IT projects, from making AI pervasive throughout government to bringing in a digital ID card. Are they thinking about the data centers they’ll need and the impact they’ll have on water management? Maybe instead tell people not to use generative AI or mine cryptocurrencies?
This much is true: data centers are a problem across the world because they require extreme amounts of water for cooling. In recent examples: at the New York Times, Eli Tan visits the US state of Georgia. At Rest of World, last year Ushar Daniele and Khadija Alam predicted upcoming water shortages in Malaysia, and Claudia Urquieta and Daniela Dib found protests in Chile, where 28 new data centers are planned.
Telling people to delete emails and pictures is just embarrassing – and sad, if people actually do it and sacrifice personal history they care about. As Masley writes, “Major governments should really know better than this.”
Two weeks ago we noted the arrival of age verification in the UK. Related, on May 8 the Wikimedia Foundation announced it had filed a legal challenge to the categorization provisions of the Online Safety Act (not the Act itself). The basic problem: there is little in the Act to distinguish between Wikipedia, a crowd-edited provider of highly curated information, and Facebook…or X.
The Foundation says nearly 260,000 volunteers worldwide in 300 languages contribute to Wikipedia. I do myself, but verified or not, I’m in no danger. Many are contributing factual information in countries where the facts offend an authoritarian government intent on shutting them up. The Foundation argues that 1) Wikipedia is “one of the world’s most trusted and widely used digital public goods; 2) it is at risk of being placed in the highest-risk category because of its size and interactive structure; 2) being so categorized would force it to verify the identity of contributors, placing many at risk; 4) could endanger the existence of tools the site uses to combat harmful content; 5) “criminal anonymous abuse”, which is what the Category 1 duty is supposed to help solve, isn’t a problem Wikipedia has. Instead, identifying volunteers is more likely to expose them to it.
So bad news: on August 11, the High Court of Justice dismissed the case.
The better news is that Justice Jeremy Johnson warned that if Ofcom does place Wikipedia in Category 1, it would have to be justifiable as proportionate. The judge also acknowledged the testimony of a user identified as “BLN”, who provided evidence of the extensive threats editors can face.
No one claims Wikipedia is perfect. But it remains an extraordinary collaborative achievement and a public good. It would be a horrifying consequence if legislation intended to protect children deprived them of it.
Illustrations: Kew Green, August 2025.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.