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Urban Harvest

Confronting climate change and poverty, a new crop of city farmers comes of age in Africa. Table of Contents | Digital Edition
Guardian Environmental Network

Google My CO2

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A disputatious blogger recently worked out that a typical Google search used half as much energy as boiling water for a cup of tea and produced 7 grams of CO2 emissions. It seemed like a classic piece of blogosphere silliness, but the company, which takes its commitment to energy efficiency very seriously, decided to crunch the numbers for itself. It found that the average search actually produces only 0.2 grams of CO2. For good measure, Google also calculated that producing a single cheeseburger generates as much CO2 as 15,000 searches. And to equal the CO2 emissions from the monthly electricity use of an average U.S. household, you’d have to hit that search key 3.1 million times. So click away!

Related Tags: Google