Here\’s an argument against Barney Frank\’s efforts to legitimize American online poker that I certainly didn\’t see coming:
Lifting the Online Poker Ban Could Cause a CO2 Emissions Boom
Playing poker online is a time consuming venture playing tournaments can take hours, and the programs make it extremely easy to play in multiple rooms while surfing the web between hands in different windows. In other words, it encourages parking yourself and sitting in front of the computer for hours.
As Pablo pointed out in his piece on the impact of internet use, computers generate between 40-80 grams of greenhouse gas emissions simply by being on (given the user gets his electricity from a coal-fired power plant, as most Americans do)now imagine some 10 million more computers on for hours longer than before. It would add up to hundreds of thousands more tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
