GOOGLE SEARCH EMISSIONS

Google responds to search carbon cost claims
Jack Riley, 12 January 2009 (UK Independent)

“A recent claim from a Harvard fellow that conducting two Google searches releases as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as that required to produce the electricity to boil a kettle has drawn criticism from the company's Senior Vice President of Operations.

“…Urs Hölzle claimed that the actual cost…is closer to one seventy-fifth of the carbon released when making a cup of tea. It is far below the 7 grams which Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist and co-founder of Enernetics, a business which sells IT companies carbon credits to help them go carbon neutral, claims is released every time a user makes one of the estimated 400 million queries the search engine receives per day…”

click to enlarge (no pun intended)

“Mr Hölzle [also] trumpets a raft of energy-saving initiatives the search giant has recently supported, from charitable arm Google.org's $45 million investment in clean energy technology last year to the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, founded in 2007 to "[cut] the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year."

“…in 2007, Australian company Heap Media launched a search engine powered by Google called "Blackle", aimed at negating the amount of energy consumed by monitors displaying the largely white background of Google's homepage by offering a similar service on a black background.”