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.
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Well, one thing that honestly could make a difference is changing the standard Internet MTU when communicating over ethernet from 1500 to something like 9000 but it would have to be a global change to make a difference. That would reduce by 1/4 the number of packets processed by hosts and routers in the path. Load on that equipment is not generated by bits per second, it is generated by packets per second.
Increasing the standard internet MTU would greatly reduce load on hosts and routers globally and provide a real (albeit small) energy saving. 1500 bytes made sense when ethernet was 10 megabits/sec and routers had only a meg of buffer.
http://staff.psc.edu/mathis/MTU/
Wikileaks should use this idea for their next releases. Longest email in history ?
Hmm. Computers? … electricity consumption? … reduction in consumption?
I’ve got a good idea! Why not switch off THIS one?
“The Met Office unveiled Britain’s most powerful super computer today, which is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second.
However, they admitted despite the £30million system being more powerful than 100,000 PCs it could still get the forecast WRONG.
The IBM computer, which is housed in special halls bigger than two football pitches, requires 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power a small town. It will provide meteorological information to a team of 400 scientists.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1185629/Met-office-unveils-UKs-powerful-supercomputer-admits-weather-forecasts-WRONG.html#ixzz13Zc2MTYY
Hilarious!
Jeff Alberts says:
October 27, 2010 at 7:01 am
It’s much better than the spam I get, but it does belong in Tips and Notes. I think it’s better. I generally don’t read such things unless they’re in Tips and Notes.
Is there any way that the Amish could be persuaded to accept the green crazies? After a few years training they would probably be quite competent farm hands.
Re: Jeff Alberts says:
I was thinking more from consumer side. I also have different memories of provider side, and there were energy savings then. We had around 300 modems housed in racks, each with it’s own mains PSU and often needing power cycling to reset them so they’d answer. Those got replaced by modem cards in a cage, then later by Ascend Max or equivalent modem servers, each generation being a bit more power efficient than it’s predecessor. Except when the Max’s overheated.. But then that’s been a challenge on the supply side ever since. Space at a premium, so cram more kit into a rack increasing the power density and cooling challenges.
H.R. and Tom in Florida — Great, LOL!
Pamela Gray says:
“We now have the capability of tracking whether or not email is opened and how long it stays opened on a server. We can track when an email is sent to the bin or saved. And we can require a ping back that it was read.”
These can all be defeated or blocked by proper settings in the mail/browser program. For now anyway. I disable all automatic responses.
“It isn’t the carbon we should be worried about here.”
Of that, there is no doubt. Someone once said no politician can sleep at night, worrying that they have left one dime untaxed.
My desktop uses 80 watts, 12 hours a day. 1 kWh. Costs about 7 cents per day. And it helps warm the room. Not as efficient as gas heat, but hardly wasted. I rather doubt the number or size of emails has any effect on this.
P.T.Barnum made a number of comments about things of this nature …
“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.”
This would be a good solution when the computer is not in use during a LONG period, but not for short periods of no use, because each time the computer is again put on, it had to restart, make checks, etc., and this takes time.
Their logic makes no sense whatsoever. My corporate e-mail server runs 24 hours per day, using around 550 Watts of electricity whether it is processing mail or not. Sending short e-mails or long e-mails or even 30M attachments doesn’t change its energy consumption in any measurable way.
There are certain times of day when its CPU load (and thus energy consumption) will go up as it indexes files and performs backups, deletes aged SPAM and bad mail folders, and other housekeeping routines. But I doubt these activities add any significant load to its daily consumption.
If I figure correctly, the more e-mail sent through our server the lower the cost and the lower the energy consumption per e-mail will be. Otherwise the server sits idle using up electricity to run its redundant power supplies, mother board, cooling fans, network controllers, and hard drives.
Has the economy grown so bad that towns can no longer afford to keep their town fools employed that they now have wasted time to write mindless articles on technical subjects that keep their foolishness finely honed?
Disclaimer: No electrons were harmed in the transmission of this web comment. However, several billion were inconvenienced to deliver it eventually to your screen.
Public Service Announcement: Please be kind to electrons – do turn on battery powered devices so as to allow a few electrons to get out and about occasionally.
Electron fact: While electricity travels at near the speed of light (less the velocity factor of the wire – bumping into impurities and all), A single electron, if it could be traced, actually traverses the wire very slowly – in the order of 0.4 cm per second on a good day, taking roughly four minutes to travel one meter.
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 kind of obsessive-compulsive focus on meaningless minutia is also intended to make the widdle greenie weenies think they are “contributing” to saving the world and thus are being “meaningful”. It keeps them busy doing nothing, including when they compare notes with each other to see who is the most
useless“caring” or “sensitive”.This kind of insane accounting has probably caused deaths in UK hospitals.
The problem goes like this: some mega-machine costs the hospital $20M, is amortised over 4 years, and can be approx. 3 times a day.
Therefore, it costs approx $5000 every time it is used.
That’s too mush to spend on relatively minor ailments, so the machine sits there idle when it could be diagnosing real problems. Simply because some idiot accountant can’t use logic.
Iamgoingtostopusingspacestomakemymessagesshorter
Cajoling the greenies to believe that spammers are destroying the planet? Hmm.. that could be a very good thing!
If I hold my breath while writing this post does that make a positive CO2 change relative to the energy required to post it?
Like Severian and Douglas DC, I immediately thought of Dilbert. I recall one where the PHB urges engineers to save electricity by not using bold-faced fonts in emails.
Email energy use will be swamped by electric car use. Imagine if 200 million cars were to be plugged in everyday to recharge. Perhaps I should look into purchasing a whole bunch of electric company stocks.
Every day I marvel at the change. Not the climate change but the intelligence/economic change. In my day a person with this chap’s level of intelligence would have been hard pushed to get a job as a street sweeper. How the devil do such people survive?
‘Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person’s annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles.’
Problem: you writing emails
Problem: a full percent of your molecular carbon emissions
Problem: you driving 200 miles
Problem: a “shocking” 80% of more than a fifth of one percent of your average electricity use
Problem: you receiving spam which you delete immediately
Problem: your molecular emissions as you send emails, agian restated
Problem: you write more emails than you ever did letters– “probably 60 times more emails” —“Think about it”!
Carbon regulation is not only unreasonable on its face, but this study shows that there is no reasonable stopping point to its application.
Especially since they can recount and/or double-state the problem (in terms of miles driving [200]and letters mailed [60]) when analyzing the molecular harm to the planet caused by your personnal electronic communications!
Nobody tell Obama, he’ll appoint a new “Czar of Acceptable Email Usage” similar to the Ministry of Information”
I notice he did not suggest the banning of porn on the internet.
Hey we could shut down the internet. Now that would save some ener…co2.
Youse is all crazy, taxing anything. That’s the camel under the nose of the tent.
Bill Marsh says: October 27, 2010 at 4:59 am
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.
Research conducted. 3.2Ghz AMD dual-core, 4GB, 3HDD
measured on a P3 Kill A Watt load meter, $16.99 at New Egg.
Startup load, homogenized data:
52 watts for 3 seconds
104 watts for 9 seconds
93 watts continuous thereafter.
So the break-even point is a couple seconds of on-but-not-being-used time. This doesn’t count the monitor, 36 watts for mine, or the couple watts used to keep a continuous 5v going to the computer power switch, or the inconvenience of waiting for a boot-up, or the 100% thermal efficiency during the winter.
Always good to put some numbers in to give a little perspective.
Kill A Watt
Excerpt:
———–
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.
———–
But such a scheme is egalitarian, and not all of us have sufficient wherewithal.
.
Your scheme would result in the silencing of voices, many possessing of far less wealth than yourself.
.
Soon, the scheme would INFLATE to the point of COMPLETE exclusion of all but the most wealthy and/or connected.
.
Shades of ClimateGate …
.
And anyway: WHOM would obtain the benefit of the charge? That is, WHERE would that collected charge go? Que bono? Who benefits …
.
Your idea plays =DIRECTLY= into the hands of the warmist.