Environmental science and technology researchers alike are ardently studying the voracious energy demands and carbon emissions of machine learning and artificial intelligence, searching for “green AI.” Efforts like Digital Cleanup Day urge the average user to tidy up their overflowing inboxes to reduce the pressure on hot, panting cloud servers. But “Green AI” surely will not be green enough. And when data storage gets too tight, most of us respond by loosening the belt on iCloud, OneDrive, or Google Docs and proceeding to gobble data at the same rate as before.
