Energy, Digital Preservation, and the Climate: Proactively Planning for an Uncertain Future
Sibyl Schaefer
Energy is the currency of life and the foundation for all digital preservation activities. It is energy, in the form of electricity, which allows us to write physical marks on various substrates and energy which allows us to read those marks. The industrial revolution, powered by coal and oil, supercharged our technology by greatly increasing the amount of energy available to us at only the cost of extraction. This surge of cheap energy into our civilization was what allowed us to advance our technology and develop computers and the digital realm. As we move into the middle of this century, energy will affect our ability to preserve digital materials in two critical ways. First, the age of cheap oil is coming to an end. As oil becomes more expensive to extract, less and less energy will be available. Second, the byproducts of burning fossil fuels such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen, create greenhouse gasses (GHGs) which have warmed our atmosphere and destabilized our climate. The more energy we use from fossil fuels, the more we create an inhospitable planet. In order to proactively plan for the future ahead of us, the digital preservation community needs to become aware of the risks inherent in our critical dependency on energy and enact adaptation strategies to address those threats. Methodologies, like those presented in the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) suite, provide a way of selecting strategies that are adaptive to multiple futures. While there’s no way of knowing what the future will bring, the current state of our climate guarantees that it will not be business as usual.
governance, resourcing, and management for dp scaling up