In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

I partially use my computer to heat my living space, and it does a very good job. It’s particularly cold here right now — way below freezing in fact, and electricity from British-owned National Grid is just frighteningly expensive already. My nVidia graphics card does a good job of playing games and keeping the living space warm….it’s kind of like multitasking.

Otherwise I could use a space heater, but one of those doesn’t pump out half a billion triangles per second…

Anyway, I get the feeling he may not even believe this stuff, but if it gets traction so much the better. It’s all so ridiculous anyway.

http://gigablast.com/green.html

The results would have been interesting if they had been published ten years ago — say, at the time Al Gore invented the Internet or shortly thereafter — because they were perfectly predictable then. Someone who was selling clusters or building clusters or server farms could have done the analysis and interpolation back in 1999. But that would have defeated the Harvardian Purpose:

I paraphrase Frazier

“I went to Harvard. When I’m wrong, the world makes a little less sense.”

Harvard is an institution full of preternatually brilliant people who usually make the news because of the crushing obviousness of their conclusions, and the way in which the obviousness of their conclusions requires more intervention on the part of the State. Essentially it is their University. By the time they publish it, it’s like seeing an entrepreneur featured in Forbes: you know that it’s the next thing only because it’s old news. In this case it is: “Guess what? Great big, globally dispersed server farms require electricity to operate, and a lot of it. Are you surprised? Time to tithe.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t make a lot of money by timing their revelations that way, because they do, even though they’re bone-jarringly obvious and have been to anyone for about the past ten years.

Next Harvard will be publishing a paper or series of papers on the public health risks of video games — not because of the violence in games like Call of Duty 4, but because of the risk to the planet that comes from having twin nVidia SLI cards in your box.

I loved this, though:

His 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.

And it rises to about 2g of CO2 per second when about 30% of the people who are viewing the Internet are watching the kinds of images they use the internet for in the first place. Harvard against the online porn industry! It’s the future!

They intend to tax us all into equality.

I’m just sticking this statement of the obvious in the mental file in case the overwhelmingly Democratic Party-favoring Google tries to pass itself off as a “Green” company because it would like to use less energy. Kinda like the airlines would like to use less fuel. (Because they would save $$$)

Google’s Givers Go Democratic