Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Party Online, Everyone!

In case you were worried about the carbon footprint of your internet use, the Official Google Blog has helpfully provided this post on Energy and the Internet.

It calculates the amount of electricity used by a Google search and expresses common items, including among others a glass of orange juice, a load of dishes (in an EnergyStar dishwasher, of course!), and a cheeseburger, in terms of the number of searches you could make for the same energy cost.

Quite a few, it turns out. The average monthly electricity use of a U.S. household is equivalent to 3,100,000 Google searches, so internet use is probably among the least of your energy use concerns.

An obvious note is that this calculation (at least explicitly) describes only the energy cost of searching Google on the internet. I'm not going to deny I spend a fair amount of time doing that, but I also spend a lot of online time doing other things.

It is impossible to determine, based merely on this post, whether those other things might use more energy. Watching TV shows, searching databases, downloading articles, uploading attachments, writing blog posts...the amount of energy required for these activities is not noted here.

I'm not really saying it should be, it's Google's blog and they don't have any obligation to break down the details of any activities they don't want to, but this does somewhat limit our ability to point to this as justification for declaring "woo hoo, party online everyone, internet use is completely unproblematic from an environmental standpoint!"

Although we might as well declare it anyway, just because we like to issue grand statements.


TechCrunch and Stephen's Lighthouse noticed this before I did.

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