Google responds to search carbon cost claims

A recent claim from a Harvard fellow that conducting two Google searches releases as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as that required to produce the electricity 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 seventy-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.

In Google's repudiatory blog post, Mr Hölzle trumpets a raft of energy-saving initiatives the search giant has recently supported, from charitable arm Google.org's $45 million investment in clean energy technology last year to the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, founded in 2007 to "[cut] the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year."

Wissner-Gross's claim is not the first time Google has been challenged to improve its environmental credentials; in 2007, Australian company Heap Media launched a search engine powered by Google called "Blackle", aimed at negating the amount of energy consumed by monitors displaying the largely white background of Google's homepage by offering a similar service on a black background.