Within the recent couple of weeks a discussion about CO2 emissions from IT service providers has attained considerable media coverage. It is said that two searches on Google use the same amount of energy as boiling a kettle of water. This is worth giving an extra thought the next time you google at work, or at home. Working at a communications bureau, and everywhere else, you use the Internet to gather information to support your working process, or as a source for inspiration. Using Google, for example, to search the web uses much more energy than you probably are aware of. Surely, opposing arguments about the validity of the conducted research on Google’s energy efficiency have been presented, but this does not affect my point; we consume a lot of energy that we are not even aware of.
A couple of weeks ago I heard about Blackle. Blackle is a search engine build upon Google’s databases, but provides an eco-friendly interface to the information. The background color is black, which uses less energy, than the normal white background color you usual see on web pages.
That made me think – if it really does use less energy, should CSR-minded companies, and everyone else, add a black version of their website so the environmental-minded visitor have the opportunity to choose an eco-version, and there by reduce their personal CO2 emission?
According to the creator of Blackle it was the blog ecoIron that inspired him to the development of Blackle. You can read more about this and how to reduce the energy used by your computer on Google’s blog.