Google kills dolphins and pandas
I’m pretty sure that by now many of you have read at Times Online, or at some blog linking to it, how Google, not only destroys the moral backbone of China, but how they are destroying the world – one search at a time. Nick Carr, as usual, has already written already quite nicely on the subject.
A data center you can drive around to cause even more greenhouse gas emissions.
I wasn’t that surprised to find out that Times had referenced Gartner and, I assume, Koomey’s paper (PDF) on IT power consumption, because these are the first, easiest-to-find and only reliable results one gets if one searches for such information… on Google. I was working on a paper recently and tried to find this same exact information on ICT power consumption and ended up using both above-mentioned papers as my sources.
Anyway, according to the Times and the guy who estimated all this, a Google search pops out 7 grams of CO2, everyone’s favourite greenhouse gas. To put this into perspective, that’s about 58 meters worth of driving on a car that meets EU’s 2012 target of 120g/km. As Carr points out, it’s pretty sad that the calculations behind this number aren’t public, because they’re, as he says, pretty “dubious”. Times talks about actual grams of CO2 and not some hypothetical grams, so I’m assuming that is the average amount of actual CO2 pumped to the atmosphere from a normal search.
So, let’s mangle some other numbers too. EIA estimated 2006 CO2 emissions (from consumption of coal) of US at 2 306 million metric tons and the world total at 12 064 million metric tons. According to Nicholas Carr’s calculations, Google search would account for 0,02% of the world’s CO2 emissions or about as much as Argentina. At around €15 per EUA ton (EU emission Allowance), the cost of those emissions would be about 180 000 MEUR, which is pretty good from a company whose market capitalization is less than half of that (99 billion USD). Also, by combining Google’s emissions with Gartner’s estimate, the global ICT industry is about the size of 100 Google-equivalents. (I think that’s pretty low number.)
This dicking around with guestimations and numerology is, in my opinion, pretty stupid and totally counter-productive. This is suboptimization at its worst. This whole thing reminds me of Blackle, the “black version of Google”. The idea was that white pixels consume more electricity than black ones. Well, it turned out that this was totally wrong.
Your computer does not pump out greenhouse gases through its fans like airplanes or cars do. Much depends on how that electricity is generated. Writing this post caused no CO2 emissions on my part – my computer’s electricity comes from renewable or nuclear sources. And as for hosting this blog post, I think it’s safe to assume that my marginal costs on Wordpress.com are pretty negligible (Wordpress.com says that there are today over 151 000 posts besides mine). As for you, dear readers, I’ve no idea where your electricity comes from.
As Carr points out later on in his post, the problem isn’t Google and it’s a bit wrong to focus on Google, whose interests and profits are aligned with consuming as little energy as possible and who has been active in being energy-efficient. Carr asks readers to look at themselves instead. The additional energy consumption of ICT equipment is pretty massive and it’s only growing. There’s very little we can do to change this, as many see benefits in all their new gadgets like laptops, cell phones and, now, netbooks. And modern laptops are pretty energy-efficient already. I think the solution is to use energy sources that do not cause harmful emissions. The keyword I’m after is sustainability.
Besides, what are you going to do instead of searching on the internet? Surf aimlessly? Even though this just numerology, I’d like to know what’s the break-even point at which it would be more efficient to search instead.
There are many good ways to “save the planet” that are based on facts. Feel free to use Google (or any other search engine) to learn about them.
Unpaid advertisement: The guy who originally started out this blog, Jeremy Fain is running a startup to help companies and other organizations to be “green”. If you are worried about your organization’s sustainability, why not try out Verteego to build up your sustainability report?
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Many thanks Kari for the final heads up after this interesting article. Should I add it’s free to create your organization’s sustainability report? Click right here & choose our free plan: https://www.verteego.com:11000/index.php/users/register/offer_register
About Google: the problem is the same for Google, on a large scale, as for any small web industry player. Servers & IT infrastructure overall cost a hell lot of energy. About the same as the entire aviation industry. There is room for improvement & resource optimization that are hardly aligned with scalability constraints (in other words, growth) and what you’re suggesting, to work on improving energy sources (ie renewable energy) definitely goes in the right direction when it comes to upgrading the entire web industry (& users!) to greener standards.
Great article, Kari, makes me feel like becoming more green already. You point out an interesting issue, that laptop-makers and Google’s interests are aligned with minimising power-consumption, while it’s the source of power that we have to focus on. That brings forth the problem that I don’t think many people know where their power comes from.
A number of energy players in the Netherlands advertise themselves as being green, however after speaking to the founder of one such company, I came to understand that so-called “greenness” in power-production is much harder to measure and account for than you would think. Very clean sources, like wind, solar, and nuclear power are rare, because of, well lack of wind and solar energy in the Dutch climate, and the stigma attached to nuclear power. Which leaves gas and gasoline, some of which can be produced cleanly, some of which can’t.
In other words, I think that full transparency of power companies is probably the best place to start to address this problem. And with that either a sexiness or an induced pain, so that we, the consumers, actually start to care.
Google’s own reply: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html
A compact refute of the PR-happy “kettle of tea” soundbite, but doesn’t go that much deeper into any issues. Funnily enough, they also used EU car emission standard analogy/metric to their searches.
In other words, reading about a 1000 webpages (probably less, as not all have Google-efficiency) does as much harm as driving a kilometre (0.6 miles) in Europe. Still pretty scary, but I suppose the alternative—reading 1000 pages of paper or doing actual hours of work—is even more scary
At the end of the day, it boils down to perspective and objectivity.
Data and Statistics are dangerous weapons, normally because people wave them around like swords and poke them at people.
Now, I’m not saying Google is saint-like (hell, I’m sick to death of Google and Accessibility issues!), but, in cases ike this – it’s people going for sensationalism.
They are more interested in making a name, making a fuss and getting attention.
They are not looking at the “big picture”, they are not using their information correctly and they are biasing their results from the start.
And yet they wonder why people don’t take them all that seriously!
A little common sense, a little less laziness, a little bit of careful planning and choosing “friendlier” companies…. those are the ways to save the planet.
Bashing specific organisations in attempts of getting world acclaims is just, well, worthy of our sympathy?