There’s got to be some impact to that tsunami of spam that gets sent out every hour of every day. There’s the lost productivity dealing with it. But is there a real, measurable economic or environmental impact to it? Would global warming slow down a bit if we went a few weeks with no spam at all?
I doubt it would slow down global warming much outside of “every little bit helps,” but yes, there is impact. If half of the email coming in is spam (and it’s probably more than that), than there has to be twice the number of mail servers you would otherwise need to handle the load/storage. Plus further processing power to run spam filters, bigger routers to handle the bandwidth, etc.
I received some e-mail coupons for some Spam. But then, this is Hawaii.