[l4yao]

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around 4g of CO2 per email. That's a lot!

That's like driving a car for 50 feet per email!

[ryanmercer]

I've seen figures for 1gb of data transfer ranging from 200-600g of CO2 or thereabouts.

If you look at email and think that you might have a tab open at home on a computer that it pops up in, that it might also push to your tablet and your phone and that if it is Gmail it might be mirrored on multiple servers, then add in a several kilobytes (or more) of images... I can definitely see it starting to add up to 3-4 grams.

Now factor in that excel sheet or word doc, some photos or a pdf that you're sending to a few (or hundreds) of coworkers...

[jivings]

Yeah, that's what I thought too. There's a lot of energy there in the background to account for!

[wondering123]

and how much energy is used to scan those email accounts for such emails? Don't' see this in the calculation ;-)