Spam 'produces 17m tons of CO2'

Spam 'produces 17m tons of CO2'

news.bbc.co.uk

A study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes.

The Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam report estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year.

This amounted to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2, the research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee found.

Searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam used some 80% of energy.

(visit the link for the full news article)

McAfee said the "day without spam amounted to talking 2.2 million cars off the road" and that tackling spam should be part of the campaign to reduce carbon emissions.

Amazing.. that is a huge amount of power gone..

And that is just with the 'official' spam...what about all the other advertising and e-mails ?

How many e-mails are just one-liners?
How much more will we have to reduce our daily lives in order to keep in line with rules and regs on carbon footprints?

Just what do we have to do to earn a wage these days.. a lot of people are obviously trying to do all that they can to bring in some cash..and for some of them it means sendng out spam.

What do we have to do to get the attention of others in order to make a living?

We all complain about spam or advertising, but what amount of energy is wasted in trying to stop all the spam anyway?

Could we not find a more simpler way to stop spam.. apart from turning our computers off?

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

A friend told me about this the other day, it was quite hilarious actually.

Anyone else see a possibility of 'taxing' us for our internet usage? A further way for control of the internet.

Warner where talking about charging by the download size and charging severely for going over your cap (baring in mind that every time you open a webpage, watch a youtube vid, or listen to a song, you are 'downloading').

And now this.

IMO, the internet will be getting seriously more expensive in the next couple of years.

EMM

Edit to add:

Let's keep a tally on the possible taxes for our new 'eco friendly' economy.

-We know companies are going to start being taxed heavily for their carbon foot print, also getting the lovely 'Carbon credit' system (which totally invalidates the purpose of it, but is a nice moeny maker.)

-If the companies are getting taxed for making our products, or our services, then obviously, the consumer will have to pay, we could see taxes based on the household's 'Carbon footprint'. This is a great money spinner, as at the moment, you have the choice of buying the cheap electrical goods, or the more expensive 'eco-friendly' products (I've seen TV's, refrigerators, freezers, dryers, cookers, Central heating, probably more). If you don't buy the more expensive model, you pay in taxes.

-I see Cars (and bikes, maybe even planes! Public transport?) as a major probability, each car will have a carbon rating, and you will be taxed accordingly, same may go for petrol (I may be wrong, but don't diesel's give off more CO2?).

-If they go this way with the internet, I see know reason why they shouldn't do it with the TV, although they are not trying to censor the TV, they already have (IMO). Either way, why not charge, if people are going to accept it.

There could be more, but I'm out, add them if you think of more!

Also, I think everything may go up in price anyway, as the 'offset' will be passed down to us to cover.

[edit on 18-4-2009 by ElectroMagnetic Multivers]

lol, for a moment there I thought they were talking about the meat processing company.

... wow... is my echo generation side showing?



Now that I'm on the right topic...
It doesn't surprise me that spam equates to that much energy... then again, they could be factoring in the power needed to run the servers regardless of load... but all statistics can be messed with right?

What allot of people don't understand is, you don't have to give your e-mail address to companies to get flooded with spam.
Allot of spam senders try various names etc. in an attempt to find previously non-existent addresses.
If the address exists, nothing happens once sent.
If the address doesn't exist, the e-mail is bounced back.

Of course there are security programs that fake bounce backs, but they aren't perfect.


Back when I did tech support as a kid, I used to spend a good half hour a day just filtering spam from my inbox.