My colleague’s email signature says “Think before print, save a tree“. We may have to make a new one: “Think before search, and stop global warming”. Harvard University Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross estimates that one Google search creates 7g of CO2 emissions. Boiling one cup of tea creates 15g. He was interviewd by Times Online.
With more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern.
Times Online also refers to Gartner’s estimates that ICT industry accounts for 2 percent of global CO2 emissions. It is about the same level as the whole airline industry. Wissner-Gross explains that “Google is very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy”.
3 responses so far ↓
Endymion // January 14, 2009 at 11:02 am |
Even with 1 billion searches a day Google would produce as low as 73 Gg of CO2 per year, which is equal to 1 millionth of the global CO2 productions.
More details can be found at:
http://blog.safog.com/index.php/2009/01/14/google-und-co2-emission/
Eero // January 14, 2009 at 1:38 pm |
Thanks for the comment Endymion! As the Gartner study says, the whole ICT sector’s CO2 emissions are about the same level as whole airline industrie’s. I think the value of article is to make people to understand that there is environmental impacts in all actions they make, whether searching something interesting from Google or flying 1000km by plane for a vacation.
How to really define CO2 emission of one search precisely is a difficult task. They probably had a good estimate in the article, but nothing else.
Eero
Endymion // January 15, 2009 at 6:31 am |
Eero,
you are perfectly right!