Monday, January 12, 2009

The carbon cost of Google?

The BBC is reporting on the carbon cost of Google:


Two search requests on the Internet website Google produce "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle", according to a Harvard University academic.


US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2.


Right, so, personally I think that's rubbish at the very least if that was the carbon cost then Google would go out of business every time the electricity bill arrived and surely it costs less to go a google search on my computer than it would cost if I drove down to the local library (if it still exists) and spent the day rooting through books looking for the answer to some random question I've thought of.

But I have to ask, if two google searches equate to boiling kettle how many kettles make a blog post? By asking this question have I doomed the human race?

2 comments:

Darran said...

Google have replied to this...
http://url.ie/12jk
"One Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2"

Declan said...

Thanks, I didnt spot that. Thats higher than I expected.