A study recently released by McAfee asserts that the annual amount of energy used for spam-related activities around the world could be a lot more productive if used otherwise.
The study, titled “Carbon Footprint of Spam,” purports that the 33 billion kilowatt-hours (or 33 terawatt hours (TWh)) required to transmit, process and filter spam is equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, or the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.
In other words, “average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That's like driving three feet (one meter); but when multiplied by the yearly volume of spam, it is equivalent to driving around the earth 1.6 million times,” according to McAfee’s press release about the study.
The vast majority, or nearly 80 percent of the energy consumption associated with spam comes from recipients deleting spam and searching for legitimate e-mail, while 16 percent of spam-related energy use comes from spam filtering.
McAfee also claims that spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity each year, which is equivalent to removing 13 million cars from the road.
The company also asserts, rather conveniently given its line of business, that “If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by 75 percent or 25 TWh per year, the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road.”
Spain used the least energy for spam-related activities, as it had the lowest amount of received spam messages and the smallest amount of energy use for spam per e-mail user.
The annual spam-related energy use could have powered all the homes that were foreclosed in the U.S. in 2008 (2.3 million), according to Carbonfund.org. Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming or Washington D.C. each had a carbon footprint smaller than the 17 million metric tons of CO2 that spam was responsible for.
Spam-related energy use could have powered the homes of everyone who flew on an airplane on a day in 2008 (2.2 million), or the country of Jordan.
While these figures are staggering and interesting to consider, David Coursey at PC World isn’t buying it.
“Most people don't have such wonderful power management to begin with and businesses are even worse,” he said in a blog post. “If your computer could really drop its power consumption as soon as your fingers left the keyboard and wake up when you touched it again, then the study's finding might have more validity.”
He called the McAfee study “one of those oh-so-bogus “studies” created to sell a product,” and said, “I'm not buying it--neither the study nor the software it's trying to sell. Sure spam is evil, but so are questionable studies used to sell stuff--and generate more spam.”
Sources:
http://newsroom.mcafee.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3499
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/Story?id=7343518&page=2
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/163252/is_spam_really_threatening_planet_earth_i_dont_believe_it.html
Digg 
