Ignite 2024: Jessica Warchall

For the next five minutes, I'm asking you all to get real with me. The earth is a little bit more on fire than it was when we were all born. And with that super uplifting introduction, Hello, everyone. My name is Jessica Warchall, MCN Vice President, previously a museum worker, currently an art foundation worker.

And I don't know about you, but I'm tired of seeing walls on fire, disappearing polar bear habitats, and not to mention my very best friend who almost lost her home to a wildfire. I'm on a journey to lead a more sustainable life personally. And I've been considering similar efforts professionally, focusing on museums and their intersections with climate.

What I want to talk about today is our impact as digital professionals in the arts and culture space and the environment. Of course, we alone cannot slow climate change. We're not the Alphabets, the Amazons of the world, who can make a bigger difference. But we can try to help spread information through our choices and actions and through our positions in museums and community spaces.

In the field, we talk a fair amount about the climate impacts of collections that need to be stored and maintained, buildings that need to be heated and cooled, temporary exhibitions that use and reuse materials, people and objects that travel. But what about our work in the digital? We can start to ask questions like, What is the carbon footprint of one email?

What about your whole website? Do you know if you use a green web host or data center? Does your file retention plan account for climate? Do you have a file retention plan? Well, the climate impact of our work in digital, our digital museum work, is only a small fraction of this sector's impact. We can try to be better stewards of our environment.

It takes people at every level of power. Tonight, if nothing else, I hope to get you to think twice before sending an email. So, let's get real. Up to 4% of CO2 emissions come from the digital sector. This is on par with the airline industry. First, we'll dig into email, and then we're going to look at the impact of data storage and AI.

About 347 billion emails are sent globally each day and each stamped email emits 0.3 grams of CO2. Carbon emissions from email daily globally is equivalent to more than 1,700 flights from New York to L. A. It's estimated that a designed email signature, maybe one with your logo, adds 1.2 grams of CO2 per email.

One day of email signatures alone, globally, is 150,000 cows worth of methane emissions annually. Dark data, or data that is either been used once or not at all, accounts for 65 percent of data in organization stores. Storing one email for one year is equivalent to driving your car maybe to the corner store.

The amount of energy data centers use, the more water they consume to cool their servers. Estimates about use vary. But even on the low end of 300,000 gallons each day, that's equivalent to one day of water for 3,000 people. Last year, Google's greenhouse gas emissions were up 48 percent from five years ago, driven by the exponential growth of AI.

A query to an AI chatbot requires almost 10 times the amount of energy as a regular Google search. Now I have to mention, it's not lost on me that I use generative AI to make a lot of these slides. But, it's not all bad. AI has the potential to reduce emissions in the coming years through things like climate modeling and improving efficiency in production and transportation.

So where does that leave us? Museums are our cultural leaders in our communities. We have the collective power to influence our CEOs, heads of ITs, to implement climate board practices, which has the potential to magnify our impacts and ripple into our geographies. We have the responsibility to talk to each other about the choices we make.

Do you have a green host? Share it. Do you add a line about climate impact in your RFPs? Tell us. Have you optimized your website to decrease energy use? Post about it on MCN Slack. You might be wondering, where do I start? Start small. Delete your emails. And if you use Outlook, delete them again. Think twice before sending a reply all.

Send links to documents rather than file attachments. Delete redundant photos on your devices and in your storage systems. Talk about data governance with your teams and ask your IT leads what to do with old data. And choose your technology partners and platforms with an eye toward climate. But most importantly, don't stop doing your work in AI or sharing content on socials or even sending emails.

Just be more conscious of your potential impact. Embrace museums as spaces of learning, reflection and dialogue. Encourage leaders to see where digital fits into your overall sustainability commitments. for sharing these five minutes with me. And maybe the next time you get five minutes, you'll talk a bit about your work and its intersection with the environment.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And happy MCNing.