THE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN
IMPROVING YOUR ENGLISH LEARNING
SPAM POLLUTES AS MUCH AS 3 MILLION CARS
Category: ENVIRONMENT Date 2009-04-21 12:26:23
Spam pollutes as much as 3 million cars –based upon an Efe press article-
Unwanted e-mails, known popularly as ' spam ' (is this word really derived from Monty Python’s popular sketch about Spiced Jam?), produced a quantity of greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that caused by 3.1 million vehicles, according to a study released in April 2009 by the computer security company McAfee.
The study, called "The carbon footprint of Spam," reveals that sending spam emails to computers around the world represents an energy expenditure of 33,000 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) over a whole year, an amount of electricity that could supply 2.4 million homes.
The report stresses that this is an untapped energy, since 80% of the spam ends up being ignored and erased by the Internet.
The establishment of filters able to benchmark this increasingly common practice would mean, according to the study, a reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent to the withdrawal of millions of cars on roads worldwide.
The vice president of product development at McAfee, Jeff Green, stressed the need to stop 'spam' from its own sources "and through the development of better defense systems.
"This action, according to Green, would save time and money, and pay a dividend to the planet by reducing carbon emissions."
