The BBC reports today on the environmental cost of a single Google search. According to a Harvard University academic, each two searches on Google have the same carbon footprint as boiling a kettle. So each day, Google is wrecking the environment to the tune of 200 million searches, or 100 million cups of tea.
Right now, we're all so obsessed with the credit crunch, but it can't be long before environmental issues come to the forefront once more. And perhaps digital can't maintain it's smug "we're paper-free, so we don't contribute to global warming" stance for too much longer.
Google may not be the worst offender. A report on Trendsspotting last October compared the carbon footprint of Facebook with that of major US cities. Based on the remarkable statistic that there are now 10 billion photos hosted on Facebook, Trendsspotting calculated that the carbon footprint of Facebook was around half that of New York City - and Facebook is piling on more servers all the time to keep up with user demand.
Right now, we're all so obsessed with the credit crunch, but it can't be long before environmental issues come to the forefront once more. And perhaps digital can't maintain it's smug "we're paper-free, so we don't contribute to global warming" stance for too much longer.
Looking further ahead, maybe we will see steam-powered server farms in Iceland and have websites showing a "Hosted on recycled energy" badge.
And if you swap one of your daily cuppas for a glass of wine instead, can you do more searches on Google or less?
I can't find anything on comparative carbon footprints between a glass of wine and a cup of tea... surely this is absolutely fundamental research, students these days, sheesh!
I think it depends upon what you mean by a glass of wine. You'll be much better off with a nice English wine from a wine box... but even then I suspect that the cup of tea will win.
And I've wasted another couple of Google searches on this, so now I feel really guilty!