Environmental impact of Google searches

[TheAnimus]

Anyone got any figures on how much "green house gas" (I hate that term) have been released due to the US and UK invading various countries over the years?

All to often with war, people overlook the environemtnal costs of war. To pre-occupied with the change of power, and the human costs.

Damn them.

[Sinizter]

Google has not released any figure concerning their power consumption - so even the best estimates are just plain guesswork as these people dont even know where Google's datacenters are or how many there are.

Definitely not even worthy of being called news or being put in print.

[sleepyhead]

..and then the BBC jumps on the bandwagon.

[MadduckUK]

two search requests on the internet website Google produce as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle

not likely is it

If you enter another request you obviously end up with double that amount, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle for a cup of tea.

cup of tea eh? well you can tell he's certainly aimed that at the English! dumb yank

[Funkstar]

..and then the BBC jumps on the bandwagon.

I thought all the BBC articles had a comments box at the bottom, this one doesn't though.

I wonder if it's because of the huge number of poeple that would slate the piece and rip it appart like we have done in this thread

[Sinizter]

Quality of BBC 'news' articles certainly not increasing in line with the TV Licensing Fee.

[Butuz]

I wonder how much carbon per day the times website is producing just to feature bull$hit articles like that for idiots who believe all that they read :S

Butuz

[Saracen]

Assuming this "research" has been accurately portrayed, presumably, before coming up with this self-serving, patronising drivel, Dr Wissner-Gross carefully considered the environmental impact of his research, and whether it justified the carbon cost of doing it?

Presumably he also did everything he could to minimise that impact? Presumably he used parchment instead of paper, because the bleaching process to produce paper is harmful. Presumably he used ink from an environmentally-farmed squid, and ..... shock horror .... didn't risk any ozone production by printing anything on a laser printer. And presumably, he gather his no doubt extensive data on Google's highly confidential infrastructure by riding a bike all over the planet to count there server. But wait, what about the environmental impact of all the rubber used by his tyres? He must have calculated that, surely? And, of course, all the energy expended by eating all the food he'd have needed for that cycling .... not to mention the carbon-cost of producing and transporting that food.

Or could it be that he Googled his data, and guestimated (i.e. made up) what he couldn't get accurate data on, which will be most of it. And Dr Wissner-Gross, did you calculate the environmental impact of all the Google searches that were going to result from you publishing this drivel? Presumably you did, and presumably you decided that the social impact of the cost of all that wasted energy was justified to get your message out. Or could it just be that you're one of the "scientists" sucking at the tit of the environmental lobby, perhaps a paid sycophant more interested in his research grant and pay check than actually doing something useful.


I spent a couple of hours researching John Maynard Keynes last night, and specifically, his involvement in post-depression economics, and in Bretton Woods, the IMF and so forth. I know, I need to get a life, but I am an economist by background, and I spent years studying, among other things, his policies but had precious little time for his biography or life story. And all those years ago, I'd have taken probably days in my university library just trying to identify and track down the range of books and documents I skimmed to isolate those I actually read, and even then, would have had access to just those materials that library held. But last night, I skipped through work produced by a host of academics from all over the world. Such a knowledge hunt would barely have been possible pre-Google and pre-internet, and certainly wouldn't have been practical.

Google (or at least the search-engine capability typified by Google) is such a powerful tool to the knowledge-hungry, or even the mildly curious, that even if it did use the highly-disputed amount of energy it's claimed in that 'research', it's worth it.

Like everything, it has good and bad, and like everything, what we each get out of it will vary, but I can't help but think that in a couple of hundred years, historians will be looking at the internet and saying it caused by of the most fundamental revolutions in human history. Obviously, not all the planets population have access, though it's growing. But a LOT do. And that has meant huge access to a vast bank of knowledge, to near-instant news and reporting, and to information of all levels of utility, right down to comparing interest rates before choosing where to open a bank account.

Until the net, and Google, and to money-saving websites and yes, technology sites like Hexus, punters looking to buy some service or product either had to buy magazines (which by definition offered a choke-point on information simply due to the cost of production and the timescales involved), or by spending a lot of time (and probably petrol driving around) to locate the best deals or the right goods. Now, of course, you can get extensive information and opinions in a few minutes from your own home, so instead of driving all over the place, you save all that time, energy and carbon production by doing the bulk of it on the net .... and very likely, ordering on the net.

I wonder if the oh-so-smart Dr Wissner-Gross considered the opportunity cost of alternatives to the likes of Google before wasting his time with this 'research'? Other posters here have raised the point, but if using Google for searches has a cost, then so so does not using it, either in increased energy expenditure elsewhere, or in stifling access to news and information.

My reaction to this story? Rarely have I read such unmitigated garbage. Now if you'll all excuse me for a while, I'm going to go do a few extra Google searches, just to celebrate that we actually can. That the power of the internet and the power of engines like Google actually puts so much information at our fingertips.

So do I care if Google uses a lot of energy to run? Actually, not a lot, no. Or not at all, really.

There are so many things far less productive than having such a resource as Google, and the sites it searches and indexes, and if Google uses a lot of energy (and no doubt all those servers do), then so be it.

[Scott B]

LOL, I hadn't seen this thread before I published: Is Google bad for the environment?

[MadduckUK]

General discussion > HEXUS.channel tbh lol x

[badass]

Does this bull**** peddling imbecile not check his numbers.

We have two 42U racks with 12 servers here, some new, some old (er) and for a short period last year, we managed to run the lot off a single UPS connected to a 13 amp plug so around 3.1KW.
All of those servers are either Dual CPU/Core or Quad CPU/core.
A kettle typically uses 2-3KW to power and takes around 1 minute to boil enough water for 2 cups of tea.
Does he seriously think that one google search that the results come back in less than a second take the computing power of 30 CPU cores running full chat for a minute?
Muppet.
I've just seen the researcher Alex Wissner-Gross has a Ph. D. from Harvard university. Do they not teach checking your numbers after your calculations there?
I wonder how many searches per day are averaged on Google? I can't help but wonder if using his figures, Google uses 9/10ths of the Earths total energy usage or some ridiculous figure like that.

Anyway, his website with his CV attached http://www.alexwg.org/ (Found by a google search)

[scaryjim]

I wonder how many searches per day are averaged on Google?

I believe the article quotes 200million.

The kettle in our work kitchen draws 2200 watts, and takes ~ 45 seconds to boil its minimum amount of water (500ml), comsuming 0.0275 KWh.

Accepting the 200million searches / day figure, Googles datacentres would therefore have to draw ~ 2.75 million KWh each day to make the report accurate.

Given that Hexus test systems rarely draw more than 300W at full load, I think we can probably reasonably (i.e. OVER-guesstimating) allow a 500W power draw per server allowing for a greater density of hard drives etc. (and for the additional datacentre peripherals: UPS, switches etc). Such a server would draw 12 KWh in a day, meaning Google would need to have ~ 230,000 servers in their datacentres (each running fully loaded 24/7). Anyone think that's a reasonable estimate?

Now, the entire Google organisation might be able to draw that much power in one day, but Google do more than just serve query results...

[Fraz]

Considering the guy supposedly has a PhD, my girlfriend who is about as competent at mathematics as your average 12 year old managed to blow his numbers out of the supposedly boiling water in about 5 seconds.

What a plonker.

[Whiternoise]

This is coming from a company that produces over (i imagine) 10-30 million newspapers with glossy supplements every day?

All that paper has to be gotten from somewhere, and so does the Ink, and the printing presses that work 24/7, and the foreign workers, but i digress..

[Sinizter]

Just saw an article where he claims he only came out with some figure on average power consumption of a PC or server and that Times or someone else plugged that into this Google nonsense.

[Saracen]

Just saw an article where he claims he only came out with some figure on average power consumption of a PC or server and that Times or someone else plugged that into this Google nonsense.

That wouldn't entirely surprise me, which is why my comments started with

Assuming this "research" has been accurately portrayed, .....

But on the other hand, that Times article says

“Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

So either the Times is making up direct and attributed quotes, or quoting someone else that made them up (without checking) or Dr Wissner-Gross is being a bit economical with the truth by implying he didn't mention Google and that someone else added that bit in and just applied his generic figures to Google.

I wonder who is doing the lying?

It's just a guess, but what wouldn't surprise me is to find that he did the generic calculations, actually made the quotes taking a few cheap pot-shots and Google and someone filled in the blanks by applying his figures to Google to see why he took pot-shots at Google. Then this minor academic has suddenly and very much unexpectedly found himself at the centre of something of a media storm, and is perhaps all too aware that such a story, if not fully justified, has the potential to not only find his academic credentials in question and his credibility shot, but with his funding in question and his work and comments the subject of a deeply analytical forensic examination by Google's extremely expensive lawyers. It is what is known in parts of academia as an "Oh 'heck' " moment, followed rapidly by an entirely necessary change of underwear.