Google Bad For Environment, Says Harvard
By Daya Baran at January 12, 2009 7 Comments|
A typical search generates about 7g of CO2 and boiling a kettle generates about 15g. It is estimated that more than 200 million searches are generated daily worldwide. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power. A Google search has a definite environmental impact,” said Dr. Wissner-Gross. The Times reports that “Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other. It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.” According to a recent report by Gartner, the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines or about 2% of global CO2 emissions. |
Harvard physicist, Alex Wissner-Gross, says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy and can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea.
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7 Comments
All large web companies use many data centers and I am sure they are working to reduce their energy requirements.
But calling out that two Google Searches costs as much as boiling a cup of tea is the most absurd accusation I have seen in ages!It doesn’t help us one bit, are we stop our tea or our access to information? Makes me wonder the value I get from my cup of tea and the many hundred folds value I derive from my google searches.
They are such BIG hypocrites. What a bunch of liars. Are they upfront about anything? Google should be broken up.
Wow. Short-term energy reduction is important, but this obviously shows that there’s more that we should care about than just that. Taken to extreme, this is an argument for monopolizing search. We would save a lot more energy by shutting down all their competitors and just letting Google optimize their servers for power consumption. Who’s ready to live in that world?
Compared to what?
So instead we hop in the car and drive to the library every time we need information?
Your link from the word “secretive” leads to the official Google blog where they have more to say on this topic from their perspective. If this is true, I think they should offer customers a choice for the slow but green option when we’re not in a hurry for our search results.
To Google’s credit they are part of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit consortium that is “committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year.” They mention in their Google blog post “That’s a lot of kettles of tea.”, implying a lot of kettles saved. That means that even if we cut energy consumed by computers in half, it is an equal amount of kettles of tea that we’re still boiling.
Nonetheless, one could argue that we are using IT in lieu of jumping on airplanes and driving in our cars for some things, and there is great potential for IT to help us save the planet in other ways too, if we do it right…
This image I am seeing from 1990s … some guy will post some thing concerning for the earth becuase of some reason, now it is google.
Isn’t always something easier is at loss or work of others?
How else we can get at your desk? Like old days, go to seniors, intellectuals, professors, beaurocrats and others similar …
Instead of saying it is side effect post other better ways to improve.
Even if we turn off our computers in office and other unused places we can save lot of time.
Even if Servers are turned off during off-peak hours, it will be great. … more to say but dont use the same image for all reasons.
Bet a few years from now there will be a new study that says this one was bullshit and that the new cause will be electric cars therefore we will have to resort to running cars on absolutely nothing…
But on a more serious note this is bloody rediculous, these are the same people that insist on hydrogen powered cars (which btw the production of that causes bad pollution) and electric cars (which i’m pretty sure if taken to the extremity if everyone drove a electric car power would be all used up anyways. This is bs no offense, blaming google? Wanna know what hurts the environment every moment these idiots who got PhDs and Masters but had nothing to do sept to go into research and spend taxpayer money for stupid studies. Get over yourselves all this pollution and global warming is very minor considering gee i dunno must of this has been occuring for thousands and thousands if not millions of years WITHOUT US. I’d be more worried about the amount of CFCs formed and brought into the atmosphere from the oceans than this crap.