If I had to pick the most preposterous part of this article, and I really hate to have to, it would probably be the end when people are decried as "polluters" because they use Twitter. Even if we forget marginal cost (which the article seems to do nicely), it is still absolutely asinine to poo-poo people for using "all that energy" to post tweets when they could "conserve" it.
If I stopped doing Google queries it would actually end wasting a lot more energy than it saves. I'd have to do things like drive to the library, buy books, call people on the phone to ask them questions, or just use some other sort of electronic medium to gain access to the information, which would likely require more energy since Google is quite energy-efficient when it comes to getting me close to relevant data. Likely all of these would result in more overall energy usage and whatever new scary environmental issue that causes this week.
Look, I am all about conservation of pretty much everything. I don't leave the water running when I brush my teeth and I turn the light off when I leave a room. I do this not because I feel like it helps the environment, but because there's just no sense in wasting energy or resources when I don't need to. Google, on the other hand, directly saves me an incalculable amount of energy and resources, not to mention time.
We're at a point where unsubstantiated worry about global warming causes people to do things under the guise of conservation which, when all the calculations are made, end up actually using more energy and consuming more resources than the thing they stopped doing.
If I stopped doing Google queries it would actually end wasting a lot more energy than it saves. I'd have to do things like drive to the library, buy books, call people on the phone to ask them questions, or just use some other sort of electronic medium to gain access to the information, which would likely require more energy since Google is quite energy-efficient when it comes to getting me close to relevant data. Likely all of these would result in more overall energy usage and whatever new scary environmental issue that causes this week.
Look, I am all about conservation of pretty much everything. I don't leave the water running when I brush my teeth and I turn the light off when I leave a room. I do this not because I feel like it helps the environment, but because there's just no sense in wasting energy or resources when I don't need to. Google, on the other hand, directly saves me an incalculable amount of energy and resources, not to mention time.
We're at a point where unsubstantiated worry about global warming causes people to do things under the guise of conservation which, when all the calculations are made, end up actually using more energy and consuming more resources than the thing they stopped doing.