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January 12, 2009, 02:16 PM ET
2 Google Searches Equals One Pot of Tea
How many kettles of water have you boiled today?
That might seem like random question for the Wired Campus, but it certainly conjures a picture of the energy used to bring water up to a whistling, scalding 212 degrees.
Now consider this: Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University who researches the environmental impact of computing, says that two Google searches and bringing a kettle of water to boil generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide. About 200 million Google searches are performed every day. That’s a lot of tea.
The calculations were part of a story in The Sunday Times that looked at computing, energy consumption, and environmental impact. The story noted that Gartner had caluculated that the IT industry generated about as much greenhouse gas as the airline industry and that a Second Life avatar consumed about as much energy as the average Brazilian.
Unfortunately, much of the environmental impact of computing is hidden and distant. There’s no tailpipe sticking out of the back of your laptop. But campus IT professionals are starting to pay attention — not so much because of the carbon emissions generated by computers, but because of the growing cost of running them. —Scott Carlson
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