Google fights back on carbon claim

Google has answered back to a claim that its search engine is harming the environment.

Various newspaper reports revealed how Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University, had claimed that a typical Google search uses around half of the energy that boiling a kettle does, producing seven grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the process.

However, the search giant came out fighting on its blog.

“We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is many times too high,” the company’s senior vice president of operations, Urs Holzle, said, before providing a number-heavy explanation.

To cut a long story short, his maths showed that a Google search “uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds” while releasing “about 0.2 grams of CO2″.

This means, Mr Holzle said, that a thousand Google searches gives off the same amount of CO2 as a car which has driven one kilometre.