Since everyone plus dog is scared of global warming, McAfee has attempted turn the fear into sales for AV products.

It claims in its report with the catchy title "The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report" that spam has a carbon footprint and for everyone which crosses your inbox 0.3 grams of CO2 is produced.Now if only there were a person or company which made a product that could save polar bears and fluffy animals from the dire effects of spam. Well says McAfee we do make one or two.

Apparently the mere act of people around the world deleting spam and searching for legitimate e-mail falsely labeled as junk creates the annual energy consumption equivalent in the U.S. of 2.4 million homes using electricity and the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gas.

One spam is about the same as driving three feet in equivalent emissions. When multiplied by the 62 trillion spam e-mails sent globally, that is like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.

Now apparently the spam being created does not kill polar bears, it is all the effort of deleting it.  If people had Spam filters it only takes 16 per cent of the energy and is the same as taking 13 million cars off the road per year.

If spam filters were used universally, the energy saved would be equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road, the report said.