Google Details and Defends Its Use of Electricity 237
theodp writes "On Thursday, Google finally provided information on its energy usage, revealing that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes. Still, the search giant contends that by using more power than Salt Lake City, Google actually makes the world a greener place. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, driving to the library. As Police Chief Martin Brody might say, 'Google's going to need a bigger windmill!'"
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is not simply using that energy, that energy is being used by google users all over the world.
Those same users are also using energy locally to connect to the internet.
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Yes you can.
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Unless he checked those books out, the records of which could be read by police
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The Great Library of Alexandria
More importantly... (Score:5)
Google is also paying for their energy.
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Which is fine. You and I are the ones actually "using" google's electricity.
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And seriously...is someone out there complaining? Is this killing a spotted owl out there somewhere?
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Hmm...a LARGE IT/Information company uses a lot of electricity....big news?
And seriously...is someone out there complaining? Is this killing a spotted owl out there somewhere?
Seriously! How much electricity does Google use in comparison to, say, the New York Transit System, or Alcoa, or GM?
Re:More importantly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every bulk buyer get a big discount. If you think google uses a lot, you should see what some industrial companies that use electricity-heavy manufacturing processes (like the aluminum industry) uses. A lot of those guys have large power plants dedicated solely to them.
Re:More importantly... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even More Importantly (Score:2)
Want to save all the carbon emissions created when you search? Hold your breath [blogspot.com].
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Even crazier than that.. That Aluminium plant was built because of all the spare power from the dams in the area that were built to supply Hanford Nuclear Reservation to make plutonium.
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What is different about Google is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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They kinda have too. If Google uses that much power, their Power bill(s) is probably a major expense, finding ways to reduce it by a few percentage, can save a lot of money. Green Energy like wind and solar, needs big power users, who see energy as a major expense and has the resources and will to invest in making cheaper alternatives. Renewable energy sources tend to look good on paper you can get Cheaper Energy in theory after the initial capital expense.
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Then why doesn't google put there data centers in Arizona and power it with a 200Mw solar thermal plant? they could even sell the energy to a nearby by town.
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Probably because the extra expense of cooling in that climate would outweigh the benefit of better solar collection.
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Geothermal cannot be done safely, cleanly, or efficiently in the USA, or any other corporatism. We have the world's largest geothermal plant in the world's most geothermally active region and it is not only continually over budget and under production, but cleaning the turbine blades led to a superfund site where they buried the detritus removed from them, and has also produced a big fat layer-cake of arsenic and other wonderful materials on site, a cake that is just waiting to break open due to seismic act
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There's just not enough geothermal power available to be a primary power source. It's great for towns with a local hotspot (though if locally overused it can apparantly cause earthquakes and strange environmental damage), but it doesn't scale.
By comparison, per square meter of the Earth's surface, there's about 10000 times as more solar power than geothermal power.
Dear Sirs, (Score:3)
Further, because power is one of our major operating costs, you will find that our competitors are unlikely to be able to deliver lolcats and porn appreciably more efficiently than we can.
Here endeth the justification.
it shouldn't be about how much they use (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google's datacenter design is an industry secret, but it is routinely reported they are amazingly efficient.
They have opened up about some things, such as their power supply design. They've asked the rest of the world to adopt this, so the entire world would reduce energy consumption. They also run on DC rather than AC. And they don't use mammoth UPS protection. They have a small battery built into each server.
It looks like this story is part of a smear campaign to make Google look like evil for using all t
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I'm not an electrical engineer. Why is using DC more efficient than AC? I'm assuming it arrives in the building as AC.
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Anytime you convert AC DC there's some loss due to inefficiency. They can create DC centrally more efficiently than doing it in each and every server chassis (like your home computer does, in the power supply). This efficiency has a two-fold effect as well, since that lossy conversion results in heat as a byproduct, so the more efficient you are with getting power from generation to work, the less you spend on cooling it too.
Re:it shouldn't be about how much they use (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not an electrical engineer. Why is using DC more efficient than AC? I'm assuming it arrives in the building as AC.
Computers use DC, not AC.
This means that at some point you have to do the conversion. The question is whether it's more efficient to do it in a small converter in each machine (traditional power supply unit), or to do it in a big converter that then feeds many boxes. The question isn't trivial because even though the big converter is unquestionably more efficient, you then have to deliver the DC power to the machines, and DC transmission is less efficient than AC transmission, meaning you either lose more energy to resistance or have to use bigger wires. Another common wrinkle is to convert AC to 48-volt DC then put small step-down transformers in each server or perhaps on each rack. This is because transmission of higher voltages is more efficient.
Bottom line is that there are a lot of tradeoffs and it's really not obvious what the best way to do it is, and Google's put a lot of skull sweat and experimentation into figuring out what's most efficient, and has (I think) published it.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't know anything about how power is managed in Google data centers, and haven't even read what Google has published to the world on the topic. Oh, and I am not an electrical engineer either.)
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Computers run on DC. The big power supply unit in your PC is an AC-DC converter.
The speculation is that Google is doing a couple of different things in regards to power.
First, they are probably doing the AC to DC conversion at the building's power inlet, and distributing DC to the racks so that each piece of equipment doesn't have to have its own power supply. One big power supply is generally more efficient than lots of small power supplies, not just in conversion efficiency but also in hard equipment cost
the homes comparison is odd (Score:5, Insightful)
The more relevant comparison seems like it'd be to other commercial users. It's not likely that if Google were disbanded, it would turn into residential population; it's more likely that, if we didn't have Google, we'd have other companies employing these people and occupying a certain niche of the economy.
From that perspective, is Google's energy usage high or low for a company of its market-cap / revenue / profits? For example, it has almost exactly the same market cap as Wal-Mart; how does the energy usage of the two companies compare, both in terms of overall size, and things like greenness of the source?
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Considering it's Walmart we're talking about they're probably importing cheap energy from unshielded nuclear power plants in China or something.
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And the problem with this is?
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For example, it has almost exactly the same market cap as Wal-Mart; how does the energy usage of the two companies compare, both in terms of overall size, and things like greenness of the source?
While it might be interesting, comparing the power usage of Google and Wal-Mart is about as useful as the above comparison of Google to residences. Internet search & internet advertising are very different businesses from retail department stores & warehouses. Instead compare Google's power use to that of Microsoft, Yahoo, and other computing/data centre companies. If possible, account for the differences in what each company does. As for Wal-Mart, compare them to K-Mart, Kroger, and maybe even Ama
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Not really that odd. How do you make a figure of that much power consumption relatable to the average reader?
I have no idea how big Wal-Mart is, but saying it has the same market cap as Google is just as pointless. Wal-Mart has thousands (I assume; like I said, I have no idea how to quantify how big they really are, just that they're really really big) of stores, each with a moderate HVAC system attached.
If you want to go that way, you also have to compare transportation costs - not relevant for Google, hig
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I guess I find this a red hearing at best.
1. Power to Google is a cost of doing business they are doing all they can to reduce the their power consumption for no other reason the less they spend on power the more profit.
2. It is us that is using the power.
It is kind of like people complaining about GM selling SUVs. They sold SUVs because that is what people bought. If people bought small fuel efficient cars then they would have made them.
Rule one. Don't expect companies to make you do the right thing.
Rule t
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No, they sold SUV's because they were profitable. It took them a little while to figure out how to get people to buy them, but they pulled it off. And by profitable, I don't mean they sold well, I mean they cost much less to make than they're sold for.
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I don't think that's a useful metric either. Google doesn't have thousands of large stores that individually use a lot of energy. Most of Google's energy usage comes from (I assume) the few dozen large datacenters.
News Flash: Bing Trumps Google (Score:3)
by defending Steve Ballmer's use of oxygen.
I get more use out of Google than Salt Lake City (Score:3, Funny)
So it's a fair trade.
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You need to experience a Mormon girl gone wild, you'll change your opinion.
Google says huh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, driving to the library.
Sure, because the guy who just searched Google to find out what goatse is would clearly have gone to the library to look up such trivial information had Google not been available....
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Google or another company ; still the same. (Score:2)
Re:Google or another company ; still the same. (Score:4, Insightful)
... not to mention all of the large .orgs and .edus I've seen that now use some flavor of gmail/docs instead of running their own 24x7 mail & file servers like they did 10 years ago.
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With that in mind, the question becomes: which company offers these services in the greenest way ?
All of them. Lower power costs mean more profit. Google is behaving like a business, nothing more. (Not that I'm bitching about it, just stating it)
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If I had mod points, I would have given them to you.
Waste what? (Score:2)
Al Gore didn't invent electricity to be wasted on the internet.
Before Google (Score:2)
Wehen I was a kid, we were more green.
Specifically, my dad had a very cool looking light green '67 Ford Galaxie 500 with a 390 cubic inch V8. When I needed info for a report, my mom used it to drive me down to the public library, probably getting about 9 mpg. So we consumed about 20 kWh worth of fully leaded fuel to do a few simple queries. That's probably enough energy to run one of Google's server nodes for more than a week, but at least we did it in style.
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Dang. Those old Falcons are some of my favourite 60s cars.
Much lower than I expected (Score:3)
I did a back-of-napkin calculation last night, and came up with about 30-33% of the energy consumption would be related to office operations, and the remainder data center operations. Their data center total came out to something like 170MW demand. Given that a 100,000 square foot data center would be expected to draw about 20MW all-in, the total was much lower than I would have expected. For some reason, I pictured their demand being much higher.
As for alternative energy, green energy, and efficiency, Google really is doing a good job. Comparing them to Bank of America, I would say Google does significantly more for the kWh.
Not a problem here (Score:2)
Why is the total electricity used by Google a problem? Google has a huge network of data centers, offices and other business entities that use electricity. The total amount of electricity used is going to be huge.
The real question... has and is Google working to use that electricity wisely and with an eye to maximizing value and minimizing waste? Well from what I have read over the years the answer is Yes.
Everyone, GM, Toyota, the US government, The City of LA, and even my dear old Mom uses electricity (
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Total used, how it's produced and where it is produced should also be scrutinized, as well as efficiency.
What's the point? (Score:2)
Why don't FedEx or the New York Publ
OMG Computers use electricity! get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
"Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, driving to the library."
This is exactly akin to Software/Content makers saying that every piracy count is exactly one lost sale. If I had to actually drive to the library, I wouldn't actually DRIVE each time I was wondering about some trivial answer to a meaningless question.
All of that said, data centers use electricity.. if we want to do anything e- or i- (or o- or u-, and sometimes y-) we need to realize that. Google is well aware of how much it spends on electricity, and I'm pretty sure they take steps to try and minimize their expenses (such as using warm-boxes instead of cooling ambient air, etc..)
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I think the bigger problem is that IT removes the need for jobs. Without them we have less tax income to do anything, such as mitigate co2 emissions.
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That makes no sense. There is no benefit to useless jobs. All that matters is productivity, and if you can achieve that with less people, it's only better.
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If I had to actually drive to the library, I wouldn't actually DRIVE each time I was wondering about some trivial answer to a meaningless question.
Okay, now what about that major report due for school. Or any other non-trivial meaningless question that you would have went to the library for and now don't have to.
They aren't implying they are great because of the energy you saved not doing something you wouldn't have done before, even if your habits didn't change, and you searched once or twice a month, Google would STILL be saving massive amounts of energy, and on top of it, they're answering millions of extra meaningless trivial questions.
Bloom Boxes? (Score:2)
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I was curious what a Bloom Box is. So I looked it up. From http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/ [bloomenergy.com]:
"Each Bloom Energy Server provides 100kW of power, enough to meet the baseload needs of 100 average homes or a small office building... day and night, in roughly the footprint of a standard parking space. For more power simply add more energy servers."
100kW for 100 average homes? What exactly are they smoking? You can't even run a hair dryer in all 100 homes for that.
Morbo says: (Score:2)
"Windmills do not work that way!"
I recall (Score:2)
Crappy logic (Score:2)
Okay, honestly there are very few things that I look up on google that I would drive to a library to research.
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There are tons of thing I and my kids look up that we would need to go to the library for; however that's just one small exampl of hos overall point.
How many things to you do on the internet that you would have had to leave your house to do? How much less physical mail do you have compared to email?
Who grants permission? (Score:2)
Since when does anyone have to MORALLY justify their energy usage?
Google does some shady things. Using power is not among them.
It's a commodity. They purchase it. Sheesh.
dataservers are industrial engines of 21st century (Score:2)
I'd like to see a comparison to the energy usage in producing a days consumption of food or living in a house. Those numbers are nto small either.
probably efficient per petabyte/petaop (Score:2)
really? (Score:2)
200,000 homes do not use the same amount of power as a city of 186,000.
Typical headline, typical summary (Score:2)
I'm really tired of the media knowingly and intentionally misleading their readers into assuming something. The use of absolute figures in the knowledge that most readers have no sense of scale is intentionally stating information out of context.
Jump down to paragraph 5 and the facts are made more relevant due to context:
Re:OMFG Give me a break (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue is not how much energy Google uses. The issue is whether or not Page and Brin are hypocrites. The answer is that they are hypocrites. They preach about Global Warming, yet flew off to the south pacific to view an eclipse.
Re:OMFG Give me a break (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, not necessarily. I'm sure they're hypocrites to an extent, but you could make the same argument about people who claim to be animal lovers who aren't vegan. Just because a feeling doesn't rule all aspects of your life, that doesn't mean you're a hypocrite. People who eat meat can still work to benefit animals in other ways (working at the shelter, cleaning up a habitat, etc) and people who care about carbon emissions can both invest in cleaner energy while using massive amounts of it. Besides, Google is one of the largest corporations in the world and is primarily geared towards electronic-powered devices; why wouldn't it use a lot of power?
Also, when you have that kind of money, why shouldn't you be able to see the celestial event of a lifetime? Yeah, they could have put it towards more energy, but people could also use the money they spend on entertainment and give it to charity instead. There's nothing wrong with doing both.
Re:OMFG Give me a break (Score:5, Interesting)
If you believe someone gives good advice, then calling them a hypocrite isn't a free pass to spend more time criticizing their following of said advice than you do following it yourself.
I honestly don't care how much energy Sergey and Larry use: we'd get a thousand times farther if we reduced the energy footprint of the average American by a tenth of a percent than we will bitching at Google founders until they implement every green technology known to man. Just accept that they're flawed, self-righteous, and hypocritical and move on.
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The reason that Brin and Page have to defend themselves from the charge of hypocrisy is that so many in the statist camp constantly try to claim that only people on the other side are hypocritical.
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...is that so many in the statist camp constantly try to claim...
Huh? What statist camp? What does being a statist have to do with criticizing family values? And who says family values are a conservative position? Most liberal families I know have a pretty core set of values, they just vary somewhat from the values held by conservative families.
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It doesn't follow conversely that because someone is a hypocrite, they must have had a valid point originally. It is just that some do.
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Calling someone a hypocrite doesn't invalid their point, but it does put it in a meaningful context. If someone is saying the world is going to end next year and we should all repent, how seriously would you take them if they put a great deal of money into a 2 year CD? That's hypocritical. If they truly believed what they were saying they'd be donating it, or at least blowing it. The fact that they're making a long term investment gives you a gauge on their confidence in their own beliefs. Maybe they'r
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All you've done is shown me that a ton of CO2 isn't a lot. You're trying to use 60 tons in an OMFG THOSE BASTARDS sort of way, but when you look at it as a single private airplane flight, which really doesn't produce THAT much CO2. So you're probably making your point less relevant to most normal people. You're also ignoring that any other method of getting there would have produced more. So you're either blowing things out of proportion on purpose, or just raging against the fact that Googles founders
Re:OMFG Give me a break (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason that Google needs to defend its use of electricity is because Page and Brin are huge proponents of the need to take drastic action to deal with man caused global warming.
But that is a false dichotomy since extreme use of energy does not necessarily imply the energy is obtained from burning coal, fecal matter, babies, dolphins and wood from endangered species in mega furnaces churning tons of smog, sooth, chlorofluorocarbons, weaponized anthrax spores and sarin gas directly into the polar ozone holes.
Taking drastic actions against global warming does not mean turning off the lights completely. It means a lot of other things regarding how to use energy efficiently. And if your business requires to use tremendous amounts of energy but you are doing it in an energy-eco-efficient manner, then you are taking drastic actions.
When you are a big supporter of those running around telling everybody that the government needs to limit how much energy people can use (limiting how much fossil fuels people can use is the same as limiting how much energy they can use, as we do not have the means, at this time, to replace all of the energy we get from fossil fuels with energy from other sources), then people are going to look closely at how much energy you use.
And which is fine and dandy, so long as people do not jump to stupid conclusions of the form (using lots of energy) -> (energy inefficient).
The issue is not how much energy Google uses. The issue is whether or not Page and Brin are hypocrites. The answer is that they are hypocrites.
Your logic is absolutely flawless</rolls eyes>
What is happening here is that you are trying very hard to find a) something to be upset about and b) someone to point the finger at to justify the former.
They preach about Global Warming, yet flew off to the south pacific to view an eclipse.
Because they only way to fight global warming is to live in absolutes and become a hermit living with in kumbaya with the bunnies, the flowers and the dolphins. The audacity of taking a pleasure trip afforded by someone's earned wealth is an unspeakable horror in this world of absolute black and whites, erasing anything of value done or spoken by the aforementioned tree killers when it comes to eco-responsibility.
By that same logic, I should stop myself talking about energy responsibility or forego taking my daughter to the park to enjoy a fine day because ZOMG I'm burning dinosaur juices right into the air!!! The horror, the horror.
Congratulations sir, here is your trophy for winning the competition of infallible logic: a crowbar. It comes very handy to unplug your one's head out of one's ass.
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Because they only way to fight global warming is to live in absolutes and become a hermit living with in kumbaya with the bunnies, the flowers and the dolphins.
I'll believe global warming is a problem, when the proponents ACT like it's a problem.
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Because they only way to fight global warming is to live in absolutes and become a hermit living with in kumbaya with the bunnies, the flowers and the dolphins.
I'll believe global warming is a problem, when the proponents ACT like it's a problem.
Because that piece of rhetoric absolutely and logically follows from my post. Here, let me help you. Define ACT. And by "define" I mean objectively, practically and pragmatically.
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global warming doesn't require belief anymore then gravity requires belief. It's happening, they overlying heating is caused by man made emission. It's a fact. If someone comes up another plausible cause it will be looked at and evaluated, just like everything else in science.
And why you think people aren't acting on it is beyond me. Insurance companies, city planners, coastal designers, all of the world are seeing change and reacting to it.
No, no one is going to go back to living in a cave because, that's
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By that same logic, I should stop myself talking about energy responsibility or forego taking my daughter to the park to enjoy a fine day because ZOMG I'm burning dinosaur juices right into the air!!!
If you believe that Global Warming is a problem that justifies massive government intervention into the everyday lives of the majority of people, then the answer is "Yes". There is a difference between talking about energy responsibility and saying that we need to stop building new coal fired electric generating plants and shut down existing ones. Page and Brin are in the latter camp.
I do not have a problem with Page and Brin using thier wealth to fly to the south pacific to view the eclipse. I have a pro
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The big problem is that every technology has a downside. Solar requires large areas of land; hydro requires us to block off rivers; coal pollutes; oil... also pollutes; nuclear is the biggest target of NIMBY-ism I can think of; geothermal is expensive and hard to do properly.
We can't magically fix our energy problems. There is only so much energy capacity in the world. We can only build so many solar panels, so many hydro plants, so man coal or oil plants, so many windmills. The better solution to fixin
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"..vast increase in government power."
what vast increase? Why do you keep saying that?
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By that same logic, I should stop myself talking about energy responsibility or forego taking my daughter to the park to enjoy a fine day because ZOMG I'm burning dinosaur juices right into the air!!!
If you believe that Global Warming is a problem that justifies massive government intervention into the everyday lives of the majority of people, then the answer is "Yes".
Ah, I get it. You correctly identify that Global Warming is a massive externality not accounted for by current markets, and therefore can only be addressed by government intervention, or altruism on a massive, unprecedented and completely unlikely scale. You then use an exaggerated position that cannot be met by anybody who isn't living in a cave off of berries, and which serves a dual-purpose: it guarantees that no one can talk about how to fix Global Warming, and, in the unlikely case you do come across s
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If Global Warming was likely to cause hundreds of millions of deaths without dramatic government action, would you consider that urgent enough?
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a carbon taxor cap is simply a tax or regulation on a negative externality, something we have been doing for hundreds of years there is no expansion of government power with that. The expansion of power came most recently when bush signed the USAPATRIOT act
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Or, you know, it could be that they understand that drastic action doesn't mean moving back to caves and living off of berries. That there is something in between our current use and zero that would mitigate our current problem.
No, couldn't be. Instead of proposing sensible solutions that are easy to implement which have a significant effect, they are hypocrites to be ignored. Let me guess: the only people who aren't hypocrites are the people who tell you what you're doing is A-OK, and that you don't need t
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I love how when a prominent spokesperson who calls for Americans to return to moral values is caught violating those moral values it is used as evidence that all proponents of moral values are morally bankrupt.
Citation needed.
But when people who call for Western economies to bankrupt themselves to prevent the disaster of Global Warming
Citation needed.
are caught acting as if it is no big deal
Citation needed.
we are supposed to ignore thier actions and just evaluate thier message.
Strawman.
Man, not even one sentence that can be used as a point of debate in any way.
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They flew in a jet, so they dont care about climate change...hasty generalization. You cannot judge someone based off one action. You have to tally everything they do compared to your "ideal" person".
Re: Google, you are comparing totally watts per unit to total units, its not a valid comparison.
Google is one of the largest companies in the world (by market cap). Market cap by watt, its tiny.
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If there wasn't a google, the likelyhood is there would be someone doing what google does anyway and they might just be using a lot more power to do it.
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I don't have an issue with Google using more power so we lose less. I have an issue with them using it as an excuse to blame people for power usage, by going to the library. It's the responsibility of big corporations to push economical, green energy, not to push oil and coal on us and then blame the people for global warming etc.
They are not blaming people for going to the library. They are saying, or so their argument goes, they are facilitating people with more energy-efficient means of searching things compared to driving to the library.
That you deliberately chose to interpret their argument the way you did speaks more about your than them. Either that or there is a tremendous failz in reading comprehension.
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Agreed. Actually it's a good thing that Google went out of their way to run their operations on clean energy, not-polluting costs money. They're paying extra for good PR and they deserve it.
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Not when the cost of using energy doesn't reflect the actual environmental toll because regulation is lax,