Internet giant Google has disclosed its carbon footprint. Google's total emissions in 2010 were just under 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. As a reference point, this is higher than the entire country of Laos and is similar to the United Nation's operational carbon footprint. On a brighter note, Google asserts that their data centers use half the energy as their industrial counterparts. In addition, cloud computing, which is what Gmail uses, greatly improves energy efficiency (when compared to services that must have dedicated servers). Other interesting numbers are: each Google search accounts for about 0.2g of carbon dioxide emitted while ten minutes of YouTube viewing equates to 1g of carbon dioxide emitted. For more information, visit Google Green.
