Green crap, that is! If you’ve been reading Deceiver for a while, you know that supposedly Earth-conscious Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are fond of things like private jets, private space travel, and who knows what other carbon-spewing activities that aren’t available to you and me because we didn’t start Google. You know that Google is, in the words of Harper’s Magazine, an “energy glutton.” You know that they’re fond of “energy-saving” stunts that probably use more energy. When it comes to buying into the green movement, Google seems content to merely… browse. (Get it?)

But are you and I complicit in these planet-punking peccadillos? According to the Times Online, you might be killing us all just by reading this:

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2. Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

No way, dude! I’ve already done three Google searches over the course of writing this post, but that’s okay because I don’t even like tea.

Anyway, Google is super-pissed, and they’re firing back on their official blog:

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…

In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a group which champions more efficient computing. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That’s a lot of kettles of tea.

Mee-ouch! Take that, physicist Alex Wissner-Gross. Or as you will now be called after getting pwn3d by Google, Alex Gross-Wussy.

So, how many pizzas would I have to order on the Internet to burn off all the calories from eating all those pizzas I had to order on the Internet? I really stink at math.

Update: Gross-Wussy explains.