Debunked: The Carbon Cost of an email

Earlier today I emailed an old acquaintance on a climate change related subject$^*$.  He almost certainly did not want to hear what I had to say, and tagged the following to the end of his reply:

P.S.: Did you know:
https://carbonliteracy.com/the-carbon-cost-of-an-email/

I looked up that page and found the claim (without any supporting evidence) that a typical email generates 4g CO2e emissions while a spam email is typically around 0.3g CO2e.

This struck me as nonsense.  I've worked in telecoms for most of the last 20 years and I know that most links require the same power whether they are transmitting user data or simply transmitting to maintain synchronization.  However, you don't need to know anything about Ethernet or ADSL to show that this is complete garbage.  Let's do some arithmetic:

• a spam email is around 1KB
• an hour of Netflix is around 1GB
• the network and servers don't really care what's in the data so we can safely assume if "carbonliteracy" are right that an hour of Netflix costs about 0.3 Ton CO2e

Wow, that's a lot!  In fact it means an hour watching Netflix is equivalent to more than 3 hours in a jumbo jet.  Except, of course Carbon Literacy are talking complete BS.

The website doesn't say how it worked it all out, but my guess is that they simply considered the one-off carbon cost of the entire internet infrastructure and divided it by the total number of emails ever sent.  Which is, to be frank, nuts.

Why this matters

Climate campaigners are constantly being told to reduce their own consumption to zero before making demands (of companies, of universities, of governments).  Given the society we live in is so carbon dependent this is equivalent to saying shut up or die.  This suits vested interests very well, because - if we apply this standard - literally no-one has the moral mandate to speak on the matter.

It may look like carbonliteracy.com are trying to help, but in they are in fact simply regurgitating PR on behalf of fossil fuel companies that have worked hard to stymie any action for 30 years.  Read Climate Cover Up to get the full story on just how sinister and manipulative this project has been.

I do not know who carbonliteracy.com are.  They may be genuine and misguided or they may be a front for a PR company working for Shell.  I have no idea.  I do know that this kind of carbon illiteracy does more harm than good.

FOOTNOTES

• (*) My old acquaintance is a fellow at a Cambridge College.  I was writing to let him know that his bursar was refusing to divest from fossil fuel investments.