Google has always made much ado about its efforts to go green.  The company is calling on America to move to relying entirely on alternative energy, and is leading the way through investment in alternative energy startups.  Google also maintains some of the power-efficient server farms in the world, which help save it money, as well as reducing CO₂ emissions.

Thus some were surprised when a recent report The Times of London quoted a prominent Harvard physicist as stating that a Google search generates about 7 grams of carbon dioxide.  The newspaper equated a pair of searches to the carbon dioxide generated by bringing a pot of tea to a boil with fossil fuels.  Harvard researcher Alex Wissner-Gross was quoted as saying, "A Google search has a definite environmental impact."

The only problem was that he never said that.  Reaching out to tech site, TechNewsWorld, Mr. Wissner-Gross points out that his study never mentions Google.  He states, "For some reason, in their story on the study, The Times had an ax to grind with Google.  Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO₂ per second to visit a Web site."

How exactly, then, did The Times get their information for their sensationalist piece?

Mr. Wissner-Gross states, "I have no idea where they got those statistics.  Everything online has a definite environmental impact. I think everybody can agree on that, including Google."

The newspaper attack described Google as "secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint".  Google has already blasted back with a blog, in which it states:

We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast--a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

Google sits on the board of a new coalition called the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.  The board, which features many prominent members of tech community, pledges to cut power consumption in half by 2010.  Between that initiative and its own internal efforts with alternative energy and green server farms, the attack came as a great surprise and certainly seems unwarranted.

Mr. Wissner-Gross, who manages a site CO2Stats.com, blasted The Times for exploiting his work.  He says that the newspaper twisted his words as a "really easy way to sell papers." 

The Times has not issued a retraction or comment on the story.