Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In addition to being a giant waste of your time, spam emails are also a colossal waste of electricity, according to a recent study commissioned by the research division of McAfee (a company with, just so you know, a vested interest in convincing you that spam is evil).
Some fun little statistical nuggets from the study:
• Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline
• The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That’s like driving three feet (one meter) in equivalent emissions, but when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it’s like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.
HT New Scientist and Rebecca Skloot, via Twitter.
