The UK Thinks Deleting Your Old Emails Will Save the Planet
The United Kingdom is facing a “nationally significant” water shortage, and the government has a bold new plan to address it: telling people to delete old emails and photos.
Yes, you read that right. Instead of focusing on real infrastructure improvements, fixing leaky pipes, or ensuring adequate water storage, the UK’s National Drought Group wants citizens to tackle drought by hitting “delete” on their inbox.
Environment Agency Director of Water Helen Wakeham actually said in a press release:
“Simple, everyday choices such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.”
The logic, and we’re being generous here, is that data centers use water to cool their servers, so storing fewer files might reduce water usage. But no one in the UK government seems willing to quantify how much “email deletion” would actually save. Meanwhile, a single small data center can use over 25 million liters of water per year, and the UK continues to push for massive AI and cloud expansion, which will only drive that number higher.
The absurdity is that Britain’s real water problem isn’t your Gmail account. It’s decades of failed policy and underinvestment. While they lecture the public about their “digital footprint,” water utilities lose untold millions of liters each day from leaky infrastructure. The government’s own drought report admits that fixing a leaking toilet can save 200–400 liters per day, dwarfing whatever microscopic savings would come from a national inbox purge.
This is the climate agenda in a nutshell: ignore the big levers that actually keep the taps running, and instead shame working people into token gestures that make no measurable difference, all while politicians and bureaucrats continue business as usual.
If you want to solve water shortages, you need real investment in storage, distribution, and energy infrastructure. You need to stop dismantling reliable baseload power in favor of weather-dependent sources that strain the grid. You need to confront the water demands of the same tech industries the UK government is courting.
Deleting your cat photos from 2017 won’t keep the reservoirs full. But it does make for a nice distraction from leadership failure.
August 14, 2025