Do you really need to post that?
Everyone loves blaming AI for the planet. Change the world by changing yourself first.
Every photo, post and "great day at the beach! 🌊" you put online gets stored somewhere. And it stays there, plugged in, cooled and backed up, possibly forever. So before you hit post, ask one question: does this really need to exist?
Everyone loves a villain
Right now the internet's favourite villain is AI. Every week there's a new headline about data centres guzzling power and water. Social media jumps on the bandwagon, people share the outrage, and everyone feels a bit better about themselves.
That's human nature. It's always easier to count someone else's impact than your own.
Let's do the maths
Here's one for the nerds. Producing a single cup of coffee takes about 140 litres (37 US gallons) of water, once you count growing, processing and shipping the beans.
Google says a typical text prompt to its Gemini AI uses about 0.26 millilitres of water. That's roughly five drops.
So if you drink four coffees a day, that's around 560 litres (148 US gallons). That's the water for more than two million AI prompts, every day, before you've even opened your laptop.
And that new T-shirt the kids just had to have? About 2,700 litres (713 US gallons) of water to grow and make the cotton.
I don't drink coffee. I'm not saying that to win the argument (although I'm clearly winning). I'm saying it because the real impact is usually hiding in the things we never question.
AI companies' figures vary, and they deserve scrutiny. That's healthy. But scrutiny works best when it starts at home. I publish my own AI energy and water use every month on my Green AI page.
Yes, it adds up
Fair point: one prompt is nothing, but billions of people using AI every day compounds. I accept that. So let's compare the whole world with the whole world.
People send ChatGPT about 2.5 billion prompts a day. At five drops each, that's around 650,000 litres (172,000 US gallons). Sounds like a lot, until you meet coffee. The world drinks about 2.25 billion cups a day, and that's around 315 billion litres (83 billion US gallons) of water.
Even if AI use grew 100 times overnight, the world's coffee would still use thousands of times more water. Electricity is a bigger story: the International Energy Agency expects data centres to more than double their power use by 2030, so AI companies need to keep publishing and keep improving. That's exactly why I report my own use.
The digital junk drawer
I've started cleaning out old stuff. Old emails. Duplicate photos. Files I saved "just in case" in 2014 and never opened again.
None of that is free. It sits on a server somewhere, and that server needs power to run and cooling to stop it melting. Multiply that by billions of people and their 47 blurry photos of the same sunset, and it adds up.
It's like the junk drawer in your kitchen, except someone's paying the electricity bill to keep it open 24/7.
Got 500 unread emails? Keeping them costs the planet very little each day. The real cost is the newsletters that keep arriving that you'll never read: sent, stored and backed up, again and again. So unsubscribe first, then start deleting your junk.
I love my kids, and they love the planet. They tell me regularly how we need to save it. They're also the reason every light in my house is on when nobody's home. Saving the world is easy. Flicking a switch on the way out is apparently much harder. 😄
Here's the bit that surprised me. Leave one light on all day and you've used more electricity than hundreds of AI prompts. The Wi-Fi humming away all night while everyone sleeps? Same again.
Most of us are the same online.
Still printing?
This one's for the printers. The boarding passes, the recipes, the school notes, the emails printed "just to read properly". I get it. Paper feels real. But the old way isn't the green way.
After years of travel, this one always made me laugh. Airlines went "e" everything: e-tickets, online check-in, the lot. I'd be digital right up until the gate, where someone would print me a piece of paper to show the next person. Then, slowly, the paper disappeared. Now I just show my phone. The technology was ready years earlier. What changed was us, getting comfortable with it.
So, how comfortable are you with feeling uncomfortable?
One ream of paper (500 sheets) takes somewhere between 1,000 and 6,500 litres (264 to 1,717 US gallons) of water to make. That's the same water as using AI 20 times a day for more than 500 years.
Add about a seventeenth of a tree per ream, around $8.60 a ream, plus the ink, which costs more than the printer. Meanwhile, the boarding pass on your phone costs nothing and never gets left on the kitchen bench.
Nobody's asking you to give up paper completely. Just ask the same question: do I really need to print that?
Why it matters at home
Every family has a digital junk drawer. The 3,000 photos from one school concert. The group chat full of memes. Three streaming apps nobody remembers signing up for. The game console sitting on standby since the last school holidays.
Clearing it out does three things:
- Saves money: fewer storage plans and subscriptions you forgot you were paying for.
- Keeps the family safer: fewer old photos and details of your kids sitting online.
- Frees up your phone: no more "storage full" right when the kids walk on stage.
Make it a family game. Whoever deletes the most duplicate photos this weekend picks Friday night's movie. (Streamed in HD, not 4K. Leaf's watching.)
Change starts in the mirror
"Man jeetai jag jeet."
Conquer your own mind, and you conquer the world.
Guru Nanak, Japji Sahib
The West has its own version, and you've heard it on every flight you've ever taken. If the plane's going down and the oxygen masks drop, you put yours on first, even with two kids beside you. It feels selfish, but it isn't. If you pass out, you can't help anyone.
Changing the world works the same way. Before you share the next outrage post about AI's footprint, put your own mask on and check your own.
Post less. Delete more. Point fingers last.
Leaf has plenty more polite reminders. Get them in your inbox →
Figures current at 19 October 2026. AI companies and researchers update their numbers often, so if you're reading this later, check the sources below for the latest. Sources: coffee, 140 litres a cup, from the water footprint research of Professor Arjen Hoekstra, University of Twente. AI, 0.26 mL of water per typical Gemini text prompt, from Google Cloud, August 2025. Standby, up to 3% of household energy, from the Australian Government's energy.gov.au. Cotton shirt, 2,700 litres, also from the University of Twente research. Video streaming, about 0.077 kWh an hour, from the International Energy Agency (2019 figure). Wi-Fi router, about 10 W, from EnergySage. Phone (about 15 Wh), kettle (heating 1 litre from 20°C to boiling, about 93 Wh) and a 10 W LED light are my own calculations, rounded. ChatGPT, about 2.5 billion prompts a day, from OpenAI via TechCrunch, July 2025 (Google's per-prompt figure is used as an estimate, as ChatGPT's owner doesn't publish one in the same way; it doesn't include training the models). World coffee, about 2.25 billion cups a day, via The Motley Fool. Data centres, from the International Energy Agency, April 2025. Paper price, about $43 for a 5-ream carton of 80gsm A4 at Officeworks. Trees, about 8,333 sheets per tree, an estimate by Tom Soder (University of Maine), via PaperCut. Paper, 2 to 13 litres a sheet, from van Oel and Hoekstra, 2010.
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