This chart describes the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions associated with each component of spam energy use.
(Credit: ICF/McAfee)
Not only is spam a nuisance and sometimes criminally deceptive, it’s got a carbon footprint.
The mere act of people around the world deleting spam and searching for legitimate e-mail falsely labeled as junk creates the annual energy consumption equivalent in the U.S. of 2.4 million homes using electricity and the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gas.
That’s according to “The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report” conducted by climate-change consultants ICF and commissioned by security vendor McAfee.
The average greenhouse gas emission associated with one spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2, about the same as driving three feet in equivalent emissions. When multiplied by the 62 trillion spam e-mails sent globally, that is like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.
Eighty percent of the energy consumption associated with spam messages come from people having to do spam maintenance, the report found. Spam filtering accounts for only 16 percent of the energy use and saves the electrical equivalent of taking 13 million cars off the road per year.
If spam filters were used universally, the energy saved would be equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road, the report said.
When major spam-hosting provider McColo was taken offline last November, global spam volume dropped by 70 percent overnight. That was the equivalent of taking 2.2 million cars off the road. Unfortunately, spam levels are back up as the spammers found other places to host their spam command-and-control servers.
So far, I have posted some of the specimen spam mails I get in my inbox. Not only they pose a threat to your mental stability (after all who would not want to be a millionaire, isn’t it?), but they also increase global carbon footprint.Nowadays, most of the spam mails relate to some kind of online frauds. There are instances, when people have lost almost everything to a faceless person!
Hows and Whys of Internet Fraud
In case you are curious about Carbon Footprint then: A carbon footprint is “the total set of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organization, event or product” (UK Carbon Trust 2008). An individual, nation, or organization’s carbon footprint is measured by undertaking a GHG emissions assessment. Once the size of a carbon footprint is known, a strategy can be devised to reduce it.
Carbon offsets, or the mitigation of carbon emissions through the development of alternative projects such as solar or wind energy or reforestation, represent one way of managing a carbon footprint.
The concept and name of the carbon footprint originates from the ecological footprint discussion. The carbon footprint is a subset of the ecological footprint.
