Controversy over Carbon Produced at each Google Search

Google responds to search carbon cost claims
By Jack Riley
Monday, 12 January 2009


A recent claim from a Harvard fellow that two Google searches release as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as that required to boil a kettle has drawn criticism from the company's Senior Vice President of Operations.

Responding on the official Google blog, Urs Hölzle claimed that the actual cost of a search query is just a fraction of the figure now touted across the internet. In relative terms, the cost of 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide per search stated on the official Google blog is closer to one twenty-fifth of the carbon released when making a cup of tea. It is far below the 7 grams which Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist and co-founder of Enernetics, a business which sells IT companies carbon credits to help them go carbon neutral, claims is released every time a user makes one of the estimated 400 million queries the search engine receives per day. more