Change begins with you!

During an evening call, I noted someone having over 1K unread emails. What’s the big deal here? Everyone of us has tons of unread emails. Even we are investing in EVs to make our planet greener, but we will not delete those emails to make our earth greener.

I will not go into data about how much carbon footprint is generated. The more important aspect is why don’t we take any action even after knowing the carbon footprint generated by emails? I don’t even see any policy from google or governments to delete those unread emails after some months or years, because maybe they don’t generate such a huge amount of carbon footprint. There are other important issue to focus upon. Also internet just contributes around 6% of global greenhouse gas. Email is just a subpart of it. Why bother?

For that, history has the answers. Did you know electric cars were invented before the gasoline cars came into our lives? Now we are racing back to electric cars after innovating engine cars for decades. It is hard to change human behaviour. We prefer what is easy, not what is right. That’s a human tendency.

If Google simply tweaks the policy and starts deleting the unread emails of more than a year old. It will bring a tremendous change in human behaviour. People will at least start checking the emails and there will be an urgency to check because you don’t have them forever. Just like you tap in to check each story because it last only for 24 hours.

So I thought of creating a petition on change.org and see how people react to it. We will have the petition by next weekend. If you have any ideas, please share 🙂