Super Eco

Photo credit: SXC

I dunno—let me Google that for you. And while I'm at it, let me find a map of this afternoon's destination, order some tickets online for the weekend, look up a word to see if I'm spelling it right, check the latest news, have quick conversations with 4 other people, tweet my status, work, and of course check my email. All in the next 3 minutes.

We've become a society dependent upon technology to get anything done.

And, like with everything, there's a cost to that. A carbon cost. Every time you click it sends vast banks of server farms whirring all over the world, creating global IT industry emissions about equal to the airline industry. Yikes. But, uh ... that's 2% of the world's total emissions.

So why are we talking about this? Because in a recent Times Online article, Google was lambasted as a malevolent, secretive dark force in the underbelly of society, evilly throwing 7 grams of carbon into the atmosphere for every teeny weeny Google search. The Times said that two Google searches uses the same resources as does putting a kettle on to boil.

Turns out, it's not true. Google did a Google search and revealed that one teeny search only uses 0.2 grams of CO2. And the Times misreported the original report by Harvard scientist Alex Wissner-Gross, which didn't specifically mention Google at all. Oops.

For the record, Google has implemented several green initiatives. They invested $45 million in breakthrough clean energy technologies. They co-founded the non-profit Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a group that champions more efficient computing. And they claim they have the most energy-efficient servers in the world.

But what has all this hoopla done for us? It's brought to our attention the fact that our actions aren't self-contained. Everything we do affects something else, somewhere else. we think about our responsibility ending where the plug from our computer meets the outset in the wall, but not so. The costs of tech are so much greater than simply the amount of electricity we're using: there's the costs of production, transport, recycling. And there's the costs associated with usage, the hidden costs we can't see, but everytime we tweet or IM or email or Google, other machines somewhere are also being called into service. That's the dual nature of total interactivity—we're connecting with people but there's an environmental cost associated with that connection.

So what do we do? I can't see myself changing my Googling or working or emailing or IMing habits. But at some point there will be a tangible cost associated with such activities, whether it's taxes, increased costs of tech gadgets, or something. Somewhere, somehow, we're going to pay.

I can Google that for you.