From Warren Meyer at climate-skeptic.com From the Thin Green Line, a reliable source for any absurd science that supports environmental alarmism:
Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person’s annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles.
Dealing with spam, however, accounts for more than a fifth of the average account holder’s electricity use. Spam makes up a shocking 80 percent of all emails sent, but most people get rid of them as fast as you can say “delete.”
So how does email stack up to snail mail? The per-message carbon cost of email is just 1/60th of the old-fashioned letter’s. But think about it — you probably send at least 60 times as many emails a year than you ever did letters.
One way to go greener then is to avoid sending a bunch of short emails and instead build a longer message before you send it.
This is simply hilarious, and reminds me of the things the engineers would fool the pointy-haired boss with in Dilbert. Here was my response:
This is exactly the kind of garbage analysis that is making the environmental movement a laughing stock.
In computing the carbon footprint of email, the vast majority of the energy in the study was taking the amount of energy used by a PC during email use (ie checking, deleting, sending, organizing) and dividing it by the number of emails sent or processed. The number of emails is virtually irrelevant — it is the time spent on the computer that matters. So futzing around trying to craft one longer email from many shorter emails does nothing, and probably consumers more energy if it takes longer to write than the five short emails.
This is exactly the kind of peril that results from a) reacting to the press release of a study without understanding its methodology (or the underlying science) and b) focusing improvement efforts on the wrong metrics.
The way to save power is to use your computer less, and to shut it down when not in use rather than leaving it on standby.
If one wants to argue that the energy is from actually firing the bits over the web, this is absurd. Even if this had a measurable energy impact, given the very few bytes in an email, reducing your web surfing by one page a day would keep more bytes from moving than completely giving up email.
By the way, the suggestion for an email charge in the linked article is one I have made for years, though the amount is too high. A charge of even 1/100 cent per email would cost each of us about a penny per day but would cost a 10 million mail spammer $1000, probably higher than his or her expected yield from the spam.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Have I
just killed
a tree ?
This shows that the greens are trying to control and tax just about every aspect of your life by comparing how much CO2 everything costs.
I guess it just doesn’t sound sufficiently alarmist enough to say “Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person’s annual [carbon dioxide] emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles…. The per-message [carbon dioxide] cost of email is just 1/60th of the old-fashioned letter’s.”
It has been a very useful propaganda tool for doomers and alarmists to conflate”carbon” and “carbon dioxide,” since the former elicits the image of dirty, black soot, while the latter is simply a harmless, colorless, and odorless trace gas.
This is hilarious. Thanks!
Also, who would get the money from the email cost. A spammer probably has his own email service (as opposed to using gmail or some other service), so the profit will have to go somewhere else. Then there is the whole organizing it and having to punch in your credit card number, or having credit card numbers freely shared among email service providers or whoever gets the 1/100th of a penny. All and all it seems like too much work.
In the provincial UESR/PDRofEU island state, the UK, we have a technical expression for this kind of scientific study. We call it “A load of bollocks!” After all they do admit to this being a “best guess”! Of course this can be refined in more detail by the addition of the word “complete” inserted between the letter “A” & the word “load”. This can be refined further still by the insertion of another word, that being “old”, between the words “of”, & “bollocks”! Thus creating greater emphasis in the phrase indicating one’s contempt for such scientific studies! Of course, one can simply reduce this to a more succinct expression, if one was so disposed, by using just the one word, “Bollocks”! This is such a useful expression that it can be used in all sorts of social situations, for instance when listening to a AGW politician explain his/her views on life, the universe, everything, & global warming, & how he/she will make a difference to our everyday lives if we vote for them, knowing how their honesty, integrity, trustworthyness, dilligence, knowledge & intelligence, will shine through!
WAGTD!
This reminds me of this:
http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/20000/0000/800/20875/20875.strip.zoom.gif
An anti-virus company claims you need their product to make you greener. A cosmetics company claims you need their expensive cream to ward off the signs of ageing. A health food store claims their products will make you healthier. It is the same old popular fantasy shopping that we get in a world full of abundance and prosperity. I’ll worry about the environment when people are too poor to buy stuff.
A more sensible way to reduce consumption would be to remind people not to toss out their unneeded print-outs, but to put them face down in a stack somewhere until there are 50 or so and then put them into the printer when it runs out of paper, printing on the blank side. It also saves a bit of money, because paper costs a penny a sheet.
Another sensible way to save paper would be to encourage websites to employ techniques that truncate immaterial text (like boilerplate footers) when the Print button is pressed. (I use Firefox’s Readability plug-in to achieve this effect.)
Oh! Anthony: charges for e-mails – you know not what you do. Perhaps it is because you live in the USA and you just have no idea how innovative European politicians are when it comes to ways in which to sneak a tax on tax, on tax on everything.
We have VAT over here, a variable percentage end-user tax on everything and then other fixed, variable amount Excise and Green/Environment/recycle taxes. Your 1/100 cent e-mail charge would cost considerably more once our grubbing politicians got their hands on it.
Then you will have given them ideas and who knows what next – a “modest” charge per web page viewed, so it can be taxed.
UK has introduced a special phone line tax to pay for internet connexions for “the poor” who are disadvantaged without them. (I of course agree every workhouse should be on the Internet.)
So if not for us over here, think of the USA as His Oneness is eager to tread in the Socialist footsteps of his Euro counterparts.
Indeed. Even if you did suggest that the bulk of the ‘carbon’ usage of email was in the transmission, sending separate ones instead of one long one would add a tiny amount extra. You use up just as much bandwidth sending 10 photos by email separately as sending one email with 10 photos. The headers on an email are a fraction of the total size. That’s like saying you should merge all your Word documents together into one big file to save on disk space.
Still, the more crazy stuff like this that gets out there, the sooner the whole thing gets laughed at.
The e-mail charge seems sensible at first sight – but ever heard of thin end of the wedge? How quickly would prices go up and what other aspects of internet use would start to incur additional charges (especially if governments could get their hands on some or all of the charges and could blame it on global warming/biodiversity issues – e.g. are e-mails a threat to carrier pigeons?)?
we can all do our part to reduce co2 if we d just eliminate the use of capital letters and punctuation in our emails right
Think i’ll save this one up for Friday to send around my departemnt (Large IT Dept.), this should have the boy’s and girl’s in my office rolling around on the floor.
Makes you laugh, we’ve just had to change our welcome message when you logon to one form the carbon trust informing us that we must switch off all equipment when not in use, which is great for security as most of our up dates are run over night which we now can’t do as there switched off at the wall, which now means we are not up to date with our IT security just because of a few atoms of C and O, brilliant.
What next, an internet usage tax?
Little Blue Guy:
actually the emissions from your posts just helped a tree live longer.
Spam is often sent from hacked PCs that have been turned into “spambots.” Any per email tax would be levied on the unsuspecting PC owner, not the spamers. Spammers wouldn’t care if the tax were $1 per email, they’re not going to pay it.
Was this from “the Onion”???
If it was, it’s great parody !!
If not and it’s real, how sad for the green movement !!!
I use email about 2 times a year. At 1/100th a penny per email, would I mail in my penny to some central world email tax authority, then be good for perhaps the rest of my emailing life, the next 50 years? Seems to be a great make work project for bureaucrats.
If you want to reduce email energy use, make it illegal for anyone over 70 to forward all the crap that they do to each other, over and over again.
A fifth? That certainly seems excessive. Spam filters have gotten good enough I rarely get any bona fide spam to the client (in any of my dozen or so accounts), and false positives have not been a problem for some time.
Okay, I have to step in here.
Spammers don’t send email from their own computers anymore, that makes it too easy to stop them and prosecute them. Instead, they infect other computers with spambots, as they are called, which send out spam on command. The command server is also probably an infected computer. The current email system was designed when people didn’t think about possible abuse with the system. The information in spam is spoofed so you don’t know who it is really coming from. The only way to stop spam is for people to stop responding to it or mandate an entirely [??] way of sending email. It still exists because it works. It is impossible to charge for email using the current system.
I think I will save trees today by leaving my computer running to keep my house warm. Seems the kind of logic we see nowadays.
Re: Adam
Spammers use other peoples email service via either compromised PCs or compromised/open email servers. If they used their own then it would simply end up on a blacklist and other email servers would refuse to accept mail from it.
Charging people for sending email might seem like a good idea to reduce spam but it might actually have the opposite effect. A major ISP that I worked for had to invest heavily in anti-spam measures and it wouldn’t be unusual for them to handle 25 million or more emails in a day (most of them spam). At 1/100 cent per email this would represent an income of $250,000. There would therefore be no incentive for the ISP to identify and prevent spam from a customers compromised PC as this would reduce their income. Even if 90% of the compromised customers complained and got a refund this would still mean they had a revenue stream from the other 10%. The ISP would then have a choice: Invest in anti-spam measures and reduce a revenue stream or don’t invest in anti-spam and maintain/increase a revenue stream.