Legal Research

The Climate Change Impact of Spam

By Simon Chester

Taking off from David Canton’s post on the Economics of Spam, here’s a link to a survey from McAfee published today that has some findings that surprised me - One e-mail is like driving three feet:

An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008
Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt- hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That?s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline
Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That?s like taking 13 million cars off the road
If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce today?s spam energy by approximately 75 percent or 25 TWh per year. That?s equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road
The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That?s like driving three feet (one meter) in equivalent emissions, but when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it?s like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times A year?s email at a typical medium-size business uses 50,000 KWh; more than one fifth of that annual use can be associated with spam
Filtering spam is beneficial, but fighting spam at the source is even better. When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline in late 2008, the energy saved in the ensuing lull ? before spammers rebuilt their sending capacity ? equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road
Spam email takes a toll on the finances and productivity of private and business email users all over the world. It also is a significant drain on the global environment. Because this impact is largely a result of the amount of time end users spend searching for and deleting spam, investments in next generation spam filtering technology can pay big dividends ? in economic terms and in a positive impact on the carbon footprint of spam.

We need more than Senator Goldstein’s Bill

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 15, 2009 (boomark / email).