Ever wondered about the environmental impact of all those off-brand erectile enhancer pitches and money transfer offers from African ex-royalty? Wonder no longer.

According to a report published by computer antivirus and spam filter seller McAfee, the annual sending, receiving and hand-deleting of 62 trillion email spams consumes 33 terawatt hours of energy every year. Producing that energy emits about 20 million tons of greenhouse gases.

In the translational shorthand of environmentalism, that’s enough juice to power Chicago for two years, and the greenhouse equivalent of driving 1.6 million cars around the Earth.

The findings have met with a mixed reception. The report "strikes me as reminiscent of those insipid lost-productivity studies that blame the global recession on March Madness office pools," wrote Paul McNamara at Network World. "I’m just not ready to translate every human endeavor into an environmental forum."

Though nobody likes having every last decision turned into a morality play, there’s nothing good about spam. March Madness pools at least make office life a bit more fun. Spam, on the other hand, is entirely worthless, and it accounts for between 85 and 97 percent of all email activity. And though worrying about spam’s environmental impact is a bit like complaining about the Titanic’s deck chairs, it’s still worth fixing. Eradicating spam might not save the polar ice cap, but the world would be a bit cleaner without it.

Naturally, McAfee didn’t commission the report out of charity. They say more than half of spam’s carbon footprint is produced during its end-stage, when users scroll through messages and delete the junk. That’s exactly where their product offerings fit. The report claims that spam filtering reduces end-stage energy consumption by nearly 75 percent.

But that confluence of interest doesn’t necessarily invalidate the findings. My own spam filter — which is not, for the record, a McAfee product — has already plucked 22 messages out of my email stream today, and saved me the trouble of deleting them manually.

"It’s not just a nuisance, it’s not just clogging your inbox. It has a quantifiable environmental impact," said McAfee researcher Dave Marcus. "This is a different way of looking at something people can take control of."

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Image: Brandon Keim



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