Carr: How Green Are All Your Gadgets?

• The Find: If you're a tech enthusiast who looks down on the green credentials of the so-called "dead tree media," Nicholas Carr suggests you reevaluate exactly how environmentally friendly your plugged in lifestyle is.
• The Source: Rough Type, the blog of Nicholas Carr.

On first glance you'd say of course they are. Think how many trees have been saved, but the fatal flaw in this reasoning is the many hours we spend "dicking around online, oblivious of the electricity lighting up our screen, heating our chip, and powering and cooling the data centers we're connected to." And the amount of electricity this consumes (and thus the amount of CO2 it emits) is substantial.

Exactly how substantial is a matter for discussion. The Sunday Times (UK) this week reported the results of a study by a Harvard research fellow named Alex Wissner-Gross which concludes that two Google searches generates 14g of CO2 or about the equivalent of boiling a kettle. Carr questions these findings both because Wissner-Gross has a commercial interest in a company that tracks electrical use and because adding up the numbers for all our Google searches would produces a truly gigantic quantity of CO2. Google has also disputed the findings. (For more on the controversy, check out our U.K. blog, Sterling Performance.) But whatever the exact figure, Carr concludes,

the next time you see some lunkhead smugly bloviating about "dead tree media," ask him how much electricity his computers, smartphones, and other networked gadgets consumed that day.