Green IT Blog!!!

If Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross is to be believed (and there is little reason not to, considering his antecedents), our innocuous habit of ‘Googling’ on anything and everything on the Web has a detrimental impact on the environment. The Harvard University Physicist has worked out the carbon footprint of every search performed on the Web and that includes, Google, Yahoo and the rest.

Thus according to Dr. Wissner-Gross, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2. The newspaper that quoted him also worked out a stat that, boiling a kettle generates about 15g (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece). Hence, two searches on the Google is equivalent to boiling a kettle of water, in terms of the CO2 released.

No sooner was the story out, there was a lot of hue and cry around the environmental impact of performing a Web search, or rather Googling for most of us. The environmental equation comes from the fact that Google (and the likes) maintain humongous datacenter farms to be able to serve the need for people like me. Now, each of these farms consume enormous amount of energy, both in terms of equipment and cooling. So is Google red?

Apparently not. Over the years, Google has been talking a lot about its ‘green avatar’. While, it won’t divulge its carbon footprint, the company claims to have the ‘most efficient datacenter on the planet’. There is also a lot of preening about the recycling and sustainability initiatives at the Google Campus in California. So even though Google won’t share any specifics about its energy consumption or climate footprint, it would very much like us to believe that it indeed ‘does no evil’ when it comes to environment.

So no sooner did Time UK publish the story, it was picked up by almost all the magazines and media that matter, and Dr. Wissner-Gross became a celebrity of sorts being inundated with requests for interviews from across the globe (mine included). The communication team at Google also scurried into action, and almost on cue, a post appeared on the Google blog refuting the claim. The blog post goes on to say that:

“Google’s data center’s are carbon neutral, so it is only the client end you do have to worry about. However, breathing generates about 6g of Carbon every 10 minutes. Or about as much as they estimate computers do. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.”

According to Google, one Google search is actually equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2 and not 7 grams as mentioned by Dr. Wissner-Gross, and also goes on to state that an average car driven for one kilometre produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

But on closer look even the measly 0.2 grams looks astounding when you factor in the amount of searches done on Google, approximately 200 million a day. Thus every day, the search company is responsible for some 40000 kgs of CO2 in the atmosphere. The company might be doing a lot of other efforts to offset this emission, but that does take away from the fact that it is a fairly significant number, something like 40 metric tonnes of CO2 daily. Now that is a big cause of concern isn’t it?

Yet, our modern existence makes us very environmentally inefficient, for instance, the PCs, the music systems, the air conditioners, the cars, TV, our emails and our phone calls, etc., each of these things have an adverse impact on the environment. According to one of the estimates, a single book runs around 2,500 grams of CO2, or more than 350 times a Google search. By other estimates, a single cheeseburger has a carbon footprint of around 3,600 grams – over 500 times larger than a Google search. So, the big question arises whether we can really then do away with the carbon impact, or are we really missing the point here, when there are so many bigger avenues to cut our emissions, is it worth the while to bother about Googling.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think I can live without searching; I must have performed some dozen odd Web searches before I penned this article, amounting to some 0.24 grams of carbon. To offset it, I intend not to breathe for some 2 minutes today or won’t order a Cheese Pizza like I intended too (good for the wallet as well).

In fact, I have a better suggestion, next time you perform a search on the Web do this, hold your breath, am sure that should help, if not you or Google but at least the environment.