A study by McAfee entitled ‘Carbon Footprint of Spam’ reveals that the annual global energy used up by spam has reached a total of 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). All this power has been needed to transmit, process, and filter spam that has, in turn, reached a generation of 62 trillion spam emails swarming the earth every year.

What’s it really like to translate the plague of junk email? Spam’s aggregate consumed power equals that of all the electricity used in 2.4 million homes. To translate further what that means in carbon footprint, all that power’s CO2 is also commensurate to all the combined emissions of 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

So you think spam is just an irritation, eh? While you were trashing your share of spam, that action added up to the monster’s carbon footprint of more than 17 million tons of CO2.

Sorting out your non-spam and subsequently deleting your spam emails amount to 80 percent of consumed energy. And if you’re an average business user, you are most likely generating 131kg of CO2 every year. 22 percent of the CO2 you generate has to do with spam.

Amidst all this alarmist brouhaha, let us not forget that McAfee, of course, sells technology that filters spam.

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Via BBC/ NETWORKWORLD