Al Gore . . . put down that mouse!
Don’t tell Al Gore, but surfing the Web may also pose an inconvenient truth when it comes to hastening our environmental ruin.
That’s among the findings of a recent study by Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross on the environmental impact of Internet usage — a revelation that has, somewhat ironically, generated significant buzz in some quarters of the Web.
In a yet-to-be published study, Wissner-Gross found that roughly 20 milligrams of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere for every second that an average website is viewed. That includes the energy used both on the surfer’s end, including the electricity needed to run individual computers and the networks that they connect to, and the energy used to create and host the content itself.