Harvard physicists argue that Google is contributing to climate change through its energy consumption.

It is well known that Google is an energy hungry company. It has actually placed one of its server farms close to an abandoned metallurgic factory, because of its good supply of electricity.

Two searches equals boiling one kettle of water?

According to the British Sunday Times physicist Alex Wissner-Gross of Harvard University has found that a typical Google search generates about 7g of CO2. In comparison boiling a kettle of water generates about 15g.

This carbon print is mainly caused by the search engine’s data centers, according to this study.

Furthermore, Wissner-Gross’ 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.

Derailing the climate debate

It is a good thing to try to make companies like Google more environmental friendly.

Still, we are starting to feel some unease about stories like this. It is as if this narrow focus on individual types of energy consumption is making us lose sight of the bigger picture.

The fact is that we have reason to believe Google does everything it can to reduce its energy consumption, not necessarily because it wants to save the world, but because it makes economic sense: Electricity is becoming more and more costly and every kilowatt saved is like money in the bank.

In a response to the Sunday Times article, Google points out that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query. That is not an argument that will make environmentalists sleep more soundly at night, though.

However, Google’s main line of argument is more interesting. The company argues that the numbers presented by the Sunday Times are far too high:

Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

Focus on the big polluters

Moreover, fighting climate change is not only about cutting down on kilowatts and CO2 emissions; it is all about social and cultural change, and for that to happen people have to be informed.

We believe the Internet has contributed more to increasing the awareness of climate change than any other media with the possible exception of Al Gore (but then again he invented the Internet ;-).

Google is actually investing in clean energies through its philanthropic arm: Google.org, as are other big companies, mainly because of the public’s increasing awareness of this issue.

It would probably help much more to develop a strong public opinion that forces both government and industry to develop new alternative sources of energy (wind, solar, waves etc.) that can replace the existing reliance on fossil fuels. If that happened, it would not matter so much if a web site used an energy saving black background or a reader friendly white one.

A profit seeking publicity stunt?

There is one more factor that makes us dislike the Sunday Times article.

Together with Tim Sullivan Wissner-Gross has set up a website that helps site owners develop more energy friendly web sites.

Needless to say, certifying “green sites” may make them rich, and what better way of gaining publicity than by making Do-No-Evil-Google look like the bad guy?