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.
Oh well no more chat apps for greens then
Talking of emails…twenty three day countdown to the anniversary of that momentous “Breaking News’ email story on WUWT. How should we celebrate? Letters to the Editor, bumper car stickers, fireworks, processions? Tip jar, certainly!
Perhaps they can be pursuaded to recycle words by cutting them out of old emails and pasting them into new emails.
So by turning off my computer (which currently runs non-stop) I will reduce my “carbon” footprint? However as I run BOINC all the time, how much carbon footprint am I saving various research projects? Is it enough to compensate for my increase?
The few extra cycles I use for myself using e-mail must be minimal compared to the good I hope I am doing for basic scientific research.
Disclaimer: I will not have anything to do with Climate prediction.net!
Isn’t the underlying assumption in this ‘study’ that the computer is not consuming energy when not sending email?
I think you end up consuming MORE electricity if you turn the computer off when not composing or handling email. The start up cycle on most computers sucks up a lot more energy than one in steady state for similar time periods.
This is like the ‘studies’ people use to show that electric cars charged via coal or oil power plants use MORE fossil fuels than gas powered cars. Invariably I find in these ‘studies’ that the authors assume the gas appears magically in the tank of the gas powered vehicle and don’t account for the energy/oil necessary to refine, transport, and fuel the gas that sits in the tank.
I’m reminded of the jokes about our Australian Prime Minister of about 30 years ago.
It was said that the next tax he would introduce would be one based on penis length (more = more).
This makes me feel much the same way,
Sigh.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don’t care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don’t want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I would have commented on this article, but the damage doing so would wreak on our planet would be irreversible, and I just couldn’t live with that on my conscience.
D’oh!
The botmasters will be having a right chortle about this. But they might be the ones running the carbon market scam, so.. It all gets so confusing nowadays!
“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.”
I have followed the links and cannot find that quote. If it actually exits I want to ridicule it. Anyone seen the original source?
Found it here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/category?cat=1898
Just imagine how many resources you save by sending an email. Less paper, less work for the post office, and eventually a reduction in miles driven and weight carried in mail trucks, mail sorting machines running fewer hours, fewer people in expensive post office buildings with A/C and heat, and …
How about we shut down all of those useless climate models begin run on expensive and energy consuming computer data centers…talk about carbon footprint!! Sheeesh.
More meltdown of the climate change movement.
Ripley: Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away? — “Aliens”
Spam makes up a shocking 80 percent of all emails sent
Shocking? These people are sensitive.
[And spam takes up so much room in the “Trash” box ! Shocking. Just shocking. 8<) Robt ]
Little Blue Guy,
lol!
For the truly carbophobic, there’s even a book called “How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything.” Of course, the book itself would have a hefty “carbon footprint”, so no self-respecting carbophobe would buy it.
Would have made Climategate easier.
“Thin Green Line”
Shouldn’t that be Thick Green Line?
As in “Thick as three bog seats screwed together”?
Golf Charley, don’t give the crazies any more ideas.
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.
Hence the reason why Spammers and other Cyber-criminals use botnets these days. Like this one http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/bredolab_botnet_suspect_cuffed/
As for saving in the way how you send E-mails, its Climate Foolsday indeed.
Well….. if getting rid of spammers will help the environment, I am all for it :))
Small point – typo. “….and probably consumers more energy if it takes longer…”
“Consumes”, I think.
I don’t see why I should go to the effort of composing an entire page of useless prose when all I need to get the message across is six little words: bugger off and leave me alone!
On the other hand, it’s gotta cost more to download “1,413 Responses to Tips & Notes to WUWT” than most pieces of spam I get. 🙂
Can we double the tax on HTML Email senders?