If I had to pick the most preposterous part of this article, and I really hate to have to, it would probably be the end when people are decried as "polluters" because they use Twitter. Even if we forget marginal cost (which the article seems to do nicely), it is still absolutely asinine to poo-poo people for using "all that energy" to post tweets when they could "conserve" it.<p>If I stopped doing Google queries it would actually end wasting a lot more energy than it saves. I'd have to do things like drive to the library, buy books, call people on the phone to ask them questions, or just use some other sort of electronic medium to gain access to the information, which would likely require more energy since Google is quite energy-efficient when it comes to getting me close to relevant data. Likely all of these would result in more overall energy usage and whatever new scary environmental issue that causes this week.<p>Look, I am all about conservation of pretty much everything. I don't leave the water running when I brush my teeth and I turn the light off when I leave a room. I do this not because I feel like it helps the environment, but because there's just no sense in wasting energy or resources when I don't need to. Google, on the other hand, directly saves me an incalculable amount of energy and resources, not to mention time.<p>We're at a point where unsubstantiated worry about global warming causes people to do things under the guise of conservation which, when all the calculations are made, end up actually using more energy and consuming more resources than the thing they stopped doing.
Yah right,<p>Say you are boiling .5 liter of water, or 500 grams of water. It takes 1 calorie to raise 1g of water 1 degree. So 20 degrees to 100 * 500 g = 40,000 calories = .05 kW/h * 14c per kW/h = .7 cents.<p>Can it really cost google .7 cents to do a search? I don't see how that can possibly be. I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google, but it's about 1 to 2 billion per day. 1.5 billion * .7 cents = $1 billion per DAY - there is simply no way google is spending $300 billion for energy.<p>Even if you assume they are paying a lot less per kW/H it still makes no sense.<p>And if he is including the cost of my computer in his numbers (as he seems to imply, but doesn't say), then that's simply dishonest.<p>Edit: OOPS! Big messup on the final bit of math :( OK, I guess it's a lot more reasonable now. It's ~$3 billion per year, not 300. That's still a lot, but at least possible.<p>Any chance any of their financials with the SEC could shed light on how much they pay for energy?
Well, the <i>marginal</i> environmental cost of me doing another Google search is pretty close to zero -- those servers are already running anyway.<p>How many requests/sec per server do you think Google handles? Then we can try to guess how many additional queries we would need to make for them to buy an additional server (causing higher power consumption).
not so surprising, but an interesting comparison:<p>> "A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions."<p>also, to answer my other question:<p>> opportunity cost is an interesting point. kind of connects with the 'living in space' submission, not that space can support the life we can't support on earth.<p>> "Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.<p>> "A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use). "