How Ditching Google Can Help Fight Climate Change
Or, “How I Plant 100 Trees Every Week.”
Internet use is responsible for the release of more than 830 million tons of carbon dioxide each year into the atmosphere, or around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. For context, this makes the internet’s carbon footprint greater than that of air travel.
This is because data stored in the ‘cloud’ isn’t in the cloud at all, of course, but in massive physical data centres.
Running these data centres requires huge amounts of energy — most of which comes from burning fossil fuels. Google alone accounts for about 40% of internet-related emissions, with each search generating approximately 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions.
Given the billions of searches Google processes each year, it’s not difficult to imagine how this can add up. You can find an estimate of just how rapidly Google emits CO2 with this data visualisation.
But there is an easy way to search online without contributing to global emissions. It’s called Ecosia and it’s a search-engine that, like Google, makes most of its revenue from advertising but, unlike Google, uses its profits to plant trees.
Each search completed with Ecosia generates around 0.005 € in revenue. So, at a cost of roughly 0.25 € per tree…
