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:


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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Make ASCII Diagrams Beautifuller

Image
I've discovered an excellent tool in asciiflow.com .  The website makes it really easy to create ASCII box diagrams like this They put these things in fruit machines you know! This is ideal for source code banners, which I think should contain helpful documentation - but most programmers think it's a good place for the COPYRIGHT information and nothing else. But wait! we can make it beautifuller... and easier to read... by replacing some of the ASCII characters with ones available in UTF-8: There!  Isn't that better?  (Although some purists may object to non-ASCII characters in your code base.) SOURCE CODE: #!/usr/bin/python2 # coding: utf-8 # + gets converted in different ways depending on it's 4 neighbours # # . N . { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 3 set if N in "+|<>" # W + E { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 2 set if S in "+|<>" # . S . { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 1 set if W in "+-^v" # { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 0 set if E in
Read more

Calculation of ECS using simple convection model

Image
Contents Intro Simple stratified model Alternative convection model Tropospheric temperature gradient Approach used in convection model Calculation of Radiative Forcing from CO₂ increase Calculation of Radiative Forcing from H₂O increase Calculation of zero-feedback ECS Effect of including feedbacks Effect of water vapour Effect of cloud cover change Effect of sea ice loss Calculation of ECS including feedbacks Limitations One more thing: Changes to Troposphere depth Intro The goal of this post is to see if we can come up with an estimate of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity using a simple model in which the atmosphere is treated as well-mixed.  By "simple" I mean that using the model will not require any advanced mathematics or computation, but will still be realistic enough to come up with an estimate within the likely range of 2.5 - 4.0°C predicted by the IPCC Assessment Report 6 .  I will try to take as little on trust as possible and show how the results are arrived at.
Read more

Why growth is falling in all developed countries (as a long term trend)

Image
In this post I argue that economic growth is not the normal state of affairs, it is a blip caused by the discovery of a one-off resource of non-renewable energy.   The logistic equation $$ \frac{dy}{dt} = y(1-y) $$ Here's a simple model.  Humans discover an exploitable but limited resource and start consuming it.  The amount consumed, $y(t)$, is a function of time.  The general form of the equation is $\frac{dy}{dt} = \alpha y (\beta - y)$, but if you choose the right units $\alpha$ and $\beta$ both become $1$. Why should this work, in principle? Early on, the factor $1-y$ is approximately $1$ and can be ignored.  So the model states that annual consumption $dy/dt$ starts off proportional to $y$.  In other words, $y$ grows exponentially at first.  This could happen if exploiting the resource enables further exploitation of the resource.  For example, suppose a few humans are shipwrecked on an island with 1000 trees: they take ages to cut down the first tree as they are using their
Read more