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Jan 12, 2009 04:00 PM | 9
Companies marketing their products and services are going green, whether they're selling cars, computers or televisions. One need look no farther than last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where new products carted out invariably had a smaller carbon footprint than anything introduced a year ago. Meanwhile, products and services that aren't using enough recycled components or that hog too much energy are taking a lot of criticism.
The latest green brouhaha comes to us courtesy of a Harvard University physicist and Web juggernaut Google over the how much carbon dioxide the company's data centers are pumping into the environment each time consumers launch searches on it.
A typical search generates about seven grams of carbon dioxide, according to Alex Wissner-Gross, due to the amount of computing power required to scour the Internet for search results as quickly as possible. Wissner-Gross's research indicates that viewing a Web page generates about 0.02 grams of carbon dioxide per second, a number that jumps to about 0.2 grams of the greenhouse gas per second when viewing a Web site with complex images, animations or videos (all of which require enhanced computing power and network bandwidth to function properly), the Times of London reported yesterday.
Not so, protests Google in a blog posted today defending its enviro record and goal to become carbon neutral by using electricity derived from renewable sources only. (The company claims to have a goal of creating 50 megawatts of new renewable energy-generating capacity—via solar panels and other technologies—by 2012.) Google insisted that Wissner-Gross's estimate of power consumed per search was "many times too high" and that the actual number is closer to 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide per search. To put things in perspective, the company notes that the average car driven for 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) produces "as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches."
Data centers filled with computers (and, among other equipment, air conditioning systems required to cool them so they don't burn out) do have a significant impact on energy usage. U.S. data centers in 2006 alone consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours—1.5 percent of the country's entire electricity consumption, according to the Green Grid, a consortium of data-hungry information technology companies (including IBM, Intel and Microsoft) that insist they're pursuing ways to build more energy-efficient data centers. Research firm Gartner, Inc., in Stamford, Conn., estimates that the IT industry generates about 2 percent of the world's global-warming emissions, about the same amount emitted by all of the world's airlines combined.
It's important to note that Wissner-Gross is co-founder and CTO of Enernetics, a Boston-based company that charges companies to calculate their Web site's total carbon emissions and suggest measures to make it more energy efficient (or greener). The company charges businesses with fewer than 10,000 pages views a month $5 per month for its service, while sites with up to a million page views a month only pay a flat fee of $29.95 a month, reports FastCompany.com.
Wissner-Gross singled out Google to study due to its high profile and the data-driven nature of its business: Google is responsible for more than 60 percent of an estimated nearly 200 million Internet searches globally daily, reports xchange.com, a tech trade news Web site published by Virgo Publishing LLC.
If CES is any indicator, Enernetics should find a receptive market for its services. The annual consumer electronics showcase even featured a Fujitsu laptop with casing made is made from a blend of corn polymer and traditional petroleum plastic, Yahoo! Tech reported last week. Consumer electronics companies are beginning to cleanse their products of harmful PVC plastic and other hazardous chemicals, use more recycled plastic and offer product take-back programs, Greenpeace acknowledged in a report released last week.
As Sony chairman and chief executive Sir Howard Stringer noted in his CES keynote address: "Consumers are now [weighing] recycling and renewal materials," in their purchasing decisions. Consumer electronics companies, he added, see green marketing "as an imperative in order to sell their products."
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9 Comments
Add CommentAnother article quotes Wissner-Gross refuting the claims made by TimesOnline and points out that his paper does not say that a search requires 7 grams. His research says that one second of internet viewing produces 20 mg of CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt says that of basic websites and that google is a special case which produces 7 grams per search.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is a pretty incredibly high figure and I'd like to see google's counter-accounting of it but maybe we've just got used to a pretty incredible search engine. It all feels easy, quick and clean, but it stands to reason that such good work in such short time puts out one big puff of smoke in a carriage return.
It says that of basic websites and that google is a special case which produces 7 grams per search.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is a pretty incredibly high figure and I'd like to see google's counter-accounting of it but maybe we've just got used to a pretty incredible search engine. It all feels easy, quick and clean, but it stands to reason that such good work in such short time puts out one big puff of smoke in a carriage return.
Wissner-Gross allegedly never actually mentioned Google, so most likely he did not say that it's a special case, nor that it produces 7 grams per search. Quote (possibly even from the same website that the first commenter said he visited):
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site."
And how many angels was it dancing on the head of that pin?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is more than a waste of time; it's an insult to intelligence, too. We cannot lead our modern life without both breathing and burning energy, both of which emit carbon dioxide, neither of which is surprising or harmful to the climate.
Carbon dioxide (go on, Google it!) is vital to life; it's a wait for it plant food! It's been rising inexorably for about 50 years while temperature has wafted up and down within normal limits and it has increased the amount of all earth's plant material. There's little correlation between CO2 and temperature, and in fact CO2 levels tend to follow temperature at all time scales. In other words, temperature controls CO2 levels, not the other way around.
In their accounting of internet activity emissions, did the researchers include the browser's breathing? I mean the person. I guarantee that dwarfs the computer equipment's emissions.
I hope everybody mentioned here now gets on with something useful.
Richard Treadgold, Convenor, Climate Conversation Group.
Richard, you ignoramous.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhich point of yours should I clear up? Well lets see:
1) "We cannot lead our modern life without both breathing and burning energy"
We do not "burn" energy and in our "modern" age we do not necessarily "need" to burn fossil fuels to create electricity/energy. You and everyone else is aware of this.
2) "Carbon dioxide (go on, Google it!) is vital to life; it's a wait for it plant food! ... it has increased the amount of all earth's plant material"
Although CO2 is used by plants for growth, we, as modern humans, have been stripping the earth of plant life at an ever increasing rate. There is no hope for the remaining plant life to buffer our tremendous efforts at releasing as much CO2 as possible into the environment. Neither can the oceans hold it all, especially considering the fact that the solubility of gases in water DECREASES as temperature increases.
3) "temperature controls CO2 levels, not the other way around"
Not sure where you could have come up with this one... obvious fallacy.
4) "did the researchers include the browser's breathing? ... I guarantee that dwarfs the computer equipment's emissions"
An average person exhales approximately 1kg of CO2 daily giving an average of 0.69g/sec or 690mg/sec. However, the source of THIS CO2 is (essentially) from the digestion of plants. The source of say, internet browsing produced CO2 (via electrical use) is most likely fossil fuels. This is the big difference that you fail to note.
See http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html for more Q&A with FACTUAL answers.
Cheers,
dB33:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are wrong in so many ways. Where do you think the electricity comes from to run your computer? Is your keyboard made of plastic? Are the copper wires in your computer not covered in plastic? Or do you make your own shoes from switchgrass that you grow in your own backyard? Where do you think all of this stuff comes from?
Face it, our world, is addicted to burning cheap energy. You can call it what you want but we burn stuff to make other stuff, and to keep warm, and cool and feed people.
As one of my farmer friends commented, "Sure, I can grow food my crops without fertilizers (fossil fuel derived), or pesticides (fossil fuel derived). Everyone can. But who wants to be the one who picks out which 3 billion people will starve to death?"
As to your comment #3, it is already firmly established from ice core data that CO2 lags temperature increases by 800 years. Obviously not a fallacy. It is impossible for CO2 to cause warming. Try this one on: 800 years ago the planet was in the Medieval Warm Period. Are we now seeing the echo of that warm period showing up as increased CO2?
with out google how this world can run..so just give pardon to carbon emission
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswith out google how this world can run..so just give pardon to carbon emission
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