Spam: not sustainable?

As I had thought, Spam indeed is bad for the environment.  Not the Hormel product.  Well, maybe if you don’t recycle the can.  I suppose Spam is using the parts of the hog so it would have been wasted anyway.  No, what I mean is . . .

    Electronic Spam.  We all hate it.  We’ve been guilty of sending it, perhaps, when we forward those jokes (that is so 1990s) or BCC the crowd about our latest family event.  Depending on what you read, the stats are ridiculous:  80 to 97% of all email sent is Spam.  Yes, we have great Spam filters now, but it’s still getting sent.  But we’re not printing them (depending on what the pictures may be), but the problem is,

  Spam is a huge waste of electricity.  You use a little electricity when you send the latest Spam on how to get a Harvard diploma, but when you view it, sort it, delete it, filter it, the Economist estimates that 98% of those carbon emissions are then spewed out.  So we have more than a waste of time and an irritant—we’re wasting energy, literally and figuratively, on all that useless email.

Interestingly enough—a personal or work email drafted by hand is guilty of a little more CO₂ than an automated spam—but the huge quantities made Spam a huge electricity gobbler.

  We’d all love to get those Spam-meisters—they are getting nailed left and right, and besides the annoyance and privacy concerns, all that power fueling them has a horrible effect on our air—if we could just stop all Spam for a year, that would be like eliminating emissions from 1.5 million homes or over 3 million cars.

  Which would mean that we would import less foreign oil.  Isn’t that a good reason to turn the screws on the Spammers???

Then again, remember that urban legend email several years' back that claimed the post office was going to charge users for each email sent?  Hmm, maybe that's not such a bad idea . . .