Eco-Theater Footers

You know what I'm talking about, those silly e-mail footers that read something like:

P Please consider the environment before printing this email  

I did some back of the napkin analysis on these silly buggers:

Data	Quantity		Notes	Source
Emails Per Day	40	Emails/Day		https://review42.com/how-many-emails-are-sent-per-day/
Length of Please Consider text	64	Bytes	Assumes UTF-8 encoded text
Working Days Per Year	200	Days/Year
Emails Per Year	8000	Emails/Year
Extra bytes sent per year	512000	Email bytes/Year
Transmission Cost	9.31E-07	Wh/Byte	Adjusted downwards for a decade of efficiency improvements, units converted to Wh	https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.12630
Storage Cost	2.78E-11	Wh/Byte	Units converted to Wh	http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph240/jiang2/
Total Energy/Year	0.477	Wh/Year
Paper	0.032	Wh/Page	Assumes an average size of an e-mail is ~ 1 page, and that the energy costs for 20lb paper are larger enough than that of paper used in journal production to make up the difference.	https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/19/the-hidden-expense-of-energy-costs-print-is-costly-online-isnt-free/
Break-even point	14.9	Emails Not-Printed
	0.2%
Grams of Carbon/Wh	0.2252252	g/Wh
Carbon Weight	0.107399	g

It turns out, that the carbon cost in sending these works about to about 0.1g / year for a person sending 40 emails a day for a working year of 200 days (8000 e-mails).  Oh, and if you use Outlook, and it sends multi-part mime because you prettify your e-mails, then double it.  In order for this to balance the energy cost (w/o the doubling), it has to prevent someone from printing about 15 emails.  Considering that I've not printed a single e-mail for more than a decade, and almost all of my colleagues operate in a similar fashion, it seems unlikely that it would even have this efficacy.

It's stupid, it's not really saving the world, and it's just more stuff to not read.  So, as I say, eco-theater.

    Keith