Googling has a carbon cost

By: jzahir

San Francisco : CA : USA | 10 months ago

1 0

And you thought it was only vile acts such as flying around the world and running industries that had a carbon cost. Turns out even the perfunctory task of running a search on Google comes at a cost to the environment. So much for not being evil.

The revelation comes to light courtesy research by a Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross. A typical Google search on a desktop computer generates 7g of carbon dioxide Two such requests generate as much greenhouse gas as when you boil a kettle full of water for tea.

The source of carbon emissions in this context is the electricity produced by the computer terminal and the power consumed by the data centres hosted by Google around the globe. Google renders its incredible query return speed courtesy many such systems in parallel. Such efficiency obviously comes at a cost.

In fact, for every second we choose to stay online, we produce 0.02g of carbon emissions. And while considering the extra cost of executing a search query, we need to remember that 200 million searches are conducted a day.

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READ MORE: Google, carbon, environment, search

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