Intrigued by the enormous number of people who access the Google search engine everyday, and also by the fact that the name of the American company has become synonymous with searches on the web, Alex Wissner-Gross, a US physicist decided to investigate the effect that googling has on the environment, and found out that each search was responsible for producing as much as 7 grams (0.25 oz) of carbon dioxide, which means that two such queries produce as much pollutants as burning an electric kettle to heat water.
In addition to Wissner-Gross' study, other statistics have shown that the IT industry was, last year, accountable for emitting more dangerous greenhouse gases than the aviation industries from all countries put together, which stands for a huge quantity, considering that the air military force is one of the most polluting and highly-criticized industries in the world today.
The physicist, who is also a Harvard academic, says that his research came up with these numbers after carefully analyzing and calculating the average power consumption of a computer terminal, and that of the huge data centers Google operates around the world. According to his belief, the fact that the search engines access more than one database at each given time may also be accountable for the large carbon footprint they leave on the environment.
Wissner-Gross also argues that each minute a person stays connected to the Internet produces on average 0.02g of carbon dioxide, a number that might seem negligible at first, but which quickly becomes frightening, when considering that 200 million searches are being made on the Internet daily. A basic calculation shows that these queries are responsible for polluting the atmosphere with 28 million tons of CO2 per week.
It's highly unlikely that this research will have any impact on how Google or its users behave online, but, to its credit, the American company has assumed, over the past few years, a positive stance towards environmental issues, and tried to help with donations and advertisements as much as it could. However, there isn't much it can do to reduce its own carbon footprint caused by online activities, seeing how that could lead to it loosing customers and going out of business.
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