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Published by Steve O'Donnell on Saturday 11th October 2008, 23:01 | Related | Filed Under

How much CO2 does one Google search produce? How much for one EBAY auction or for a SecondLife avatar, or running one blog like http://www.thehotaisle.com? How do our activities on the Internet compare to driving our car? The answers might surprise you……

Fellow blogger Rolf Kersten pulled together some quite surprising numbers:

Web service

CO2 emission

Same emission as
One Google search 6.8 grams 56 meters with the Prius or running 170 meters
One EBAY auction 55 grams 420 meters with the Prius or running 1275 meters
A SecondLife avatar, 24hrs „alive“ for one year 332 kilograms 2734 kilometers with the Prius or (as a human) just living for one year
One blog post on blogs.sun.com 850 grams 7.6 kilometers with the Prius or running half a marathon

The results are based on calculating the total amount of energy required to run each companies server farm (converted to CO2) divided by the total number of transactions.

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  • Rolf blogs in German so here is a translation of some of the calculations that get to the equivalent of a 7.6KM car journey for a blog entry:

    As an example, this is how I calculated the surpisingly high blog post on blogs.sun.com number:

    We are hosting 66183 blogs in 3 years, running on two T2000 (the best servers you can get when it comes to power efficiency).

    A pair of Sun Fire T2000 servers draws 2*320Watts. Double that number for cooling and infrastructure, so you need 33628KWh in three years. That's 0.5KWh for every blog! One KWh electral power created in a coal power plant creates 1700 grams of CO2 - so the global warming effect of this blog is comparable to a runner running 21 kilometers (or sitting in front of his computer for one whole day).

    Steve
  • Thats a very good question. if this figures go be right, then we are polluting the environment at a rate we cant sustain.
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