The Week杂志上，卡梅尔•洛贝罗给出的头版标题是“iPhone比冰箱能耗更高”。

    而在The Mail Online上，瑞安•戈尔曼则写道：“大部分能量被用于云服务，而不是iPhone充电”。 戈尔曼补充说：“云服务消耗的能量主要来自于煤炭”。

    听起来很不妙，尤其是如果大家注意到布赖恩•沃尔什在《时代》杂志（Time）中指出的现象：“数字经济耗费了全球十分之一的电力，而且这份额肯定会增加，从而对经济和环境造成严重后果。”

    上面这些坏消息从何而来？它们都源自由马克•米尔斯进行的一项名为“云始于煤”的研究，米尔斯是曼哈顿研究所（the Manhattan Institute）高级研究员，也是《福布斯》（Forbes）“能源情报”专栏的作者。

    不过，在大家把iPhone扔进垃圾箱前，我想说几点： 

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

    "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."

    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."

    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.

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

    • 为互联网经济提供动力的成本不论多高，iPhone都不是问题的原因所在。iPhone实际上相当节能。美国电力研究院（Electric Power Research Institute）2012年开展的一项研究表明，iPhone 5每年充电所耗电费仅41美分。（见右表。）

    • 煤炭也许是全球使用最广泛的发电原料，但这与苹果（Apple）无关。根据苹果最新发布的环境报告，它的数据中心完全由可再生能源供电，其中包括位于北卡罗来纳州麦登市的太阳能发电站。后者被认为是全美最大的正在运营中的太阳能发电系统。

    • 《时代》杂志的沃什经过仔细调查，更新了自己文章，指出广泛引用的那项研究的作者马克•米尔斯倾向于夸大互联网的能源消耗，因为他相信烧煤烧得多是件好事。米尔斯创办了好几家由发电企业资助的非盈利组织。2006年，他还合作出版了《无底洞：燃料的没落、浪费的好处、为何我们的能源将取之不尽用之不竭》一书。（财富中文网）

    译者：项航  

    • 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. (See chart at right.)

    • 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.

    • 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."