Googling is Environmentally Unfriendly

According to an article by Times Online each search made using Google's search engine generates between 5 and 10grams of CO2! That means, since I got up this morning I have, alone, been responsible for over 200g of CO2. By the end of the day that figure is most likely to have three zeros.

Read Faster!

Surfing the Internet is apparently responsible for 2% of all international CO2 emissions we generate every day. Simply the act of reading this entry generates about 20mg of CO2 every second, so Read FASTER! The more complex the website (Flash, Animations, Video, Sound), the more CO2 generated per second. So just when we are getting to a point where Rich Internet Applications are getting interesting and actually usable, we are getting blamed for surfing, playing or learning online.

Green IT

Green IT has been around for a few years now and most, if not all, hardware manufacturers have so called green server offerings. This years CeBIT will also be focusing on Green IT. But it's not just in the hands of the hardware manufacturers to improve the efficiency to reduce the CO2 emissions. It's also the responsibility of web site developers to make their sites more efficient.

Going Green

Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist and Environmental Fellow at Harvard University, has a website CO2Stats. The website claims to help your website to be more environmentally friendly, but Dr. Gross is not doing this out of the kindness of his heart.

Make no mistake this is a business and to get my site Green Certified would cost about $10/month, and apparently provide benefits not only for the environment by also tell visitors that I care about the environment.

Well dear readers I do care about the environment. I recycle, drive either my bike to work or take public transportation, the fruit and vegetables I buy are predominately local produce thereby not only supporting the local economy but also reducing CO2 emissions required to get my food on the table (even though local produce costs slightly more than imported). 90% of the light bulbs in my house are energy efficient bulbs (even though they all contain mercury which is hazardous), and I take the stairs, not the elevator.

Sure there are probably loads of other things I can do every day to be even more environmentally conscious, but I will be damned to pay an additional $10 a month just to have a silly badge on my site, that will in reality (or at least in my opinion) do little or nothing to actually improve power efficiency. And carbon neutrality through the purchase of green certificates is, in my opinion, nothing more than a joke!