Google blames cheeseburgers for destroying the planet Google has declared newspapers, orange juice and cheeseburgers that much more harmful to the planet than running a vast network of datacentres. Urs Hölzle, senior vice president operations at Happyland Central, took to the Google blog today to put its claims that the average Google search "uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits …
Carbon is just a fad, plus the carbon mass is just computed from the energy consumption, which would change based on how our energy was produced.
Google handily gave us 1kJ per search, which means 1 kWh is 3600 searches, which is something like 3.5 glasses of orange juice (around 1 quart I imagine.)
So remind me again how many cheeseburgers the battery on the Tesla Roadster stores again?
the CO2 required to build custom servers, construct massive data centers in third-world countries and stretch fiber between them all, how much CO2 does that take? And what about all the CO2 the Streetview cars use just to take pictures of random roads and streets?
How many searches does that come to?
(ignoring the circular occurances of setting up the servers to perform the searches in the first place...)
...the sun could rise in the west any day now. What has the world come to when EVERYTHING has to be "green" (or any other color for that matter). Look, life on this planet ISN'T green anyway. Only a lifeless planet (Mars is a good example) can actually be "green", but in fact it is reddish-brown.
Get Real!
of Alex Wissner-Gross original study included all the energy used between google and your PC, so all those routers etc + your PC and monitor
I also think, although I don't know, that the amount I read on-line rather than getting a paper version of the relevant news by far outweighs the cost of running a PC, after all, I am a programmers and have my computer on 12-18 hours a day regardless of if I am working or taking a news/entertainment break.
But didn't Harvard prof Alex Wissner-Gross take into account not only Godgles energy usage but also the energy for the PC of the searcher, and not only the time it took to perform the search but the time it took the human to read the displayed results and filter out the ads etc.. ie the energy used from the point you type/click google.com to the point you click on a result (the right result? did you try three others??) and didn't it also include an amount of energy used by the Telco & ISP & backbone routers during the search request (and delivery of the first few incorrect sites??)
it all adds up....
How many gs (new S.I. unit: gs = Google search) does it take to fab the chips, support components, printed circuit boards, metal framing, case etc for a single Google-approved server? Now fill a room with the buggers and do the sums again.
It'd be funny if the answer could only be expressed in googols.
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