AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE NEWS AGENCY SOON TO ANNOUNCE IT IS VOLUNTARILY CLOSING ITS DOORS? “What’s the carbon footprint of an email?”, AFP asks:

Paris (AFP) – A long list of seemingly harmless everyday actions contribute to emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other climate-altering greenhouse gases.

Driving a car and flipping a light switch have a clear “carbon footprint” — much less obvious is the harm caused by sending a simple text message or opening a bottle of water.

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Sending even a short email is estimated to add about four grammes (0.14 ounces) of CO2 equivalent (gCO2e) to the atmosphere.

To put this into perspective, the carbon output of hitting “send” on 65 mails is on par with driving an average-sized car a kilometre (0.6 of a mile).

The culprits are greenhouse gases produced in running the computer, server and routers but also those emitted when the equipment was manufactured.

It gets worse when you send an email with a large attachment, which puts about 50 gCO2e into the air. Five such messages are like burning about 120 grammes (0.27 pounds) of coal.

So imagine how much carbon a giant electronic news gathering operation connected to a large server farm such as AFP emits. Since they’ve demonstrated that they believe their own efforts are hurting the environment so badly, they must take the lead and voluntarily shutter their doors to send the correct message to the rest of us, to prove that they take all of what they’ve written above seriously.

After all, as Glenn likes to say, I’ll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves.

Speaking of which, note the dateline on the above article. Aren’t there other, more pressing stories going on in Paris these days for AFP to reporting on? (Or is their article a retreat to their ideological “safe space” while under siege?)