iPhone能耗真的比冰箱高嗎？

The Week雜誌上，卡梅爾•洛貝羅給出的頭版標題是“iPhone比冰箱能耗更高”。

"Your iPhone uses more energy than a refrigerator," was Carmel Lobello's headline in The Week.

而在The Mail Online上，瑞安•戈爾曼則寫道：“大部分能量被用於雲服務，而不是iPhone充電”。 戈爾曼補充說：“雲服務消耗的能量主要來自於煤炭”。

"The majority of the energy is used for cloud services, not charging the iPhone," wrote Ryan Gorman on The Mail Online, adding that "the majority of the energy used to power the cloud comes from coal."

聽起來很不妙，尤其是如果大家注意到布賴恩•沃爾什在《時代》雜誌（Time）中指出的現象：“數字經濟耗費了全球十分之一的電力，而且這份額肯定會增加，從而對經濟和環境造成嚴重後果。”

Sounds pretty ominous, especially when you observe, as Bryan Walsh did in Time, that "the digital economy uses a tenth of the world's electricity -- and that share will only increase, with serious consequences for the economy and the environment."

上面這些壞消息從何而來？它們都源自由馬克•米爾斯進行的一項名爲“雲始於煤”的研究，米爾斯是曼哈頓研究所（the Manhattan Institute）高級研究員，也是《福布斯》（Forbes）“能源情報”專欄的作者。

Where is all this bad news coming from? From a study called "The Cloud Begins with Coal" by Mark Mills, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute who writes the Energy Intelligencecolumn for Forbes.

不過，在大家把iPhone扔進垃圾箱前，我想說幾點：

Before you toss your iPhone in the recycling bin, a few points:

• 爲互聯網經濟提供動力的成本不論多高，iPhone都不是問題的原因所在。iPhone實際上相當節能。美國電力研究院（Electric Power Research Institute）2012年開展的一項研究表明，iPhone 5每年充電所耗電費僅41美分。

• Whatever the cost of powering the Internet economy, iPhones are not the culprit. They are, in fact, unusually energy efficient. According to a 2012 study by Electric Power Research Institute, the cost of keeping an iPhone 5 charged is 41 cents a year.

• 煤炭也許是全球使用最廣泛的發電原料，但這與蘋果（Apple）無關。根據蘋果最新發布的環境報告，它的數據中心完全由可再生能源供電，其中包括位於北卡羅來納州麥登市的太陽能發電站。後者被認爲是全美最大的正在運營中的太陽能發電系統。

• Coal may be the world's No. 1 fuel for generating electricity, but it is not Apple's (AAPL). According to the company's most recent environmental report, its data centers are 100% powered by renewable energy, including a solar farm in Maiden, NC, that is supposed to be the largest end user-owned, onsite solar photovoltaic array in the U.S.

• 《時代》雜誌的沃什經過仔細調查，更新了自己文章，指出廣泛引用的那項研究的作者馬克•米爾斯傾向於誇大互聯網的能源消耗，因爲他相信燒煤燒得多是件好事。米爾斯創辦了好幾家由發電企業資助的非盈利組織。2006年，他還合作出版了《無底洞：燃料的沒落、浪費的好處、爲何我們的能源將取之不盡用之不竭》一書。

• As Time's Wash points out in a well-researched update, Mark Mills, the author of the study everybody was citing, tends to exaggerate the Internet's power consumption because he believes burning all that coal is a good thing. He has founded several power-industry funded non-profit organizations and 2006 he co-authored "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy."