Yesterday, McAfee and ICF shocked us with data that exposed spam’s environmental impact. Jeremy Kaplan at Good Clean Tech isn’t buying it…

Business users leave their PCs on all day regardless of whether they’ve finished sorting their inboxes, so in my eyes you can’t count any of the energy exhausted by their PCs. Besides, many email users don’t have to deal with (much) spam anyhow, with filters on the job. (Well, my old Hotmail account gets hundreds of spam mails a day, but really, I only have to deal with them when the computer is supposed to be on anyway).

In my eyes, you could really substitute “Bejeweled” or email in general or any other computing activity for spam and reach a similar computing, if all we’re doing is quantifying uptime. Bottom line: PCs waste energy, and humans leave them on too long, wasting energy. But spam? It’s kind of meaningless here.

Yes, but I enjoy Bejeweled.

The fight’s not over, though. An interesting post in the comments section reveals that the consumption figures were calculated using measures of “incremental energy” to negate the effect of an already running PC.

Either way, I think we can all agree that spam is no good, period.

Source: Good Clean Tech [via PC Mag]