Google’s annual most-searched-terms report, In The News page. Keeping It Green rankings were based on search terms within the subcategory of “green energy,” the report notes with an asterisk.

No offense, solar and renewable energy, but there’s more to the green movement than y’all! That’s why we ferreted out other green keywords and concepts we could find charting throughout the U.S. Zeitgeist 2009 report.

Sticking to the news page, under the category of In the Economy, “cash for clunkers” charted at number two of 10 terms, behind the all encompassing “crisis,” while “green” charted at the eighth most searched, economy-related term in Google News. In last year’s regional searches in 2009 public transit searches ranked in the top 10, including BART schedules at nine for San Francisco, the MTA Trip Planner and Hopstop.com at three and six for New York City, the Madison, Wisconsin Metro schedule at six for that region, and in Chicago, at two and four, the CTA bus planner and RTA Trip Planner.

Finally, on a page of household-related searches, food and drink category, the Acai Berry topped the list.

Zeitgeist reports don’t reflect the same categories year over year, exactly. And as search and business guru John Batelle griped in his own blog on Tuesday, results didn’t reflect December 2009 searches on Google.

But, let’s hope they’ll make Green a permanent Zeitgeist feature, and help sway the “collective consciousness” to the environmentally responsible side.

Basic Reading:

A slideshow at the Huffington Post reflects the Zeitgeist 2009 results.

EcoMeme, a column featuring eco news, tech and business highlights by Lora Kolodny.

The post EcoMeme: Green & Googled in 2009 appeared first on EcoSalon.

Like many of us, I rely on the computer and internet for work and, increasingly, for pleasure. Switching it off is not really an option.

Yet, I am also concerned by the fact that the IT industry is a growing contributor to the world’s greenhouse emissions. I am trying to do my part – cutting back my usage (curbing my addiction) and not indulging my love of gadgets by upgrading to the shiniest new toys as soon as they become available.

Now I have found another solution. Click 4 Carbon is a for-profit business based in the UK that aims to raise money for forestation projects in Asia. The site includes an online community and information about how to green your lifestyle. That’s all well and good but I’m sure you readers are pretty clued up about that already. What really excites me is the search tool.

Nearly anyone who uses the internet uses search. There’s no need to feel guilty about that, despite what you may have read. (The claim that two Google searches uses as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea is a myth, based on some sketchy physics guesswork and a misquote). Yet you can do better.

What I like about Click 4 Carbon is that it is not asking me to change behaviour – it is simply asking me to be smart about it. If whenever I need to do a search, I do it through Click 4 Carbon instead of Google or Yahoo. This way, I am helping a green business survive and fund forestation projects in Asia at the same time. It is still powered by Google so I know the search results will be good and the site also pledges to offset the carbon used to run the business, including its servers.

Now this is what I have been searching for.

Image: DeclanMT

The post How Your Internet Searches Can Fund Forests appeared first on EcoSalon.

If you were to update the list of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, the internet would almost certainly make the cut. With the exception of antibiotics I can think of very few other 20th century inventions that have changed society and people’s lives for good quite so profoundly.

Yet our digital addiction is also taking its toll on the environment. Coming up with hard numbers on a global scale is quite a challenge but that doesn’t stop people trying. A few days ago a UK Sunday Times article reported a surprising calculation that searching on Google – one of the most powerful web tools ever – uses far more energy than the rest of the web. Based on some publicly available information and a bit of guesswork, the article claims that it emits 7g of carbon per Google search – half the amount of energy needed to boil your kettle for a cup of tea. With more than 200 million web searches daily across the world, that’s a lot of tea. Apparently that compares with just 0.02g of carbon per second of browsing an ordinary website.

When I saw the article I was intrigued but cautious – the numbers are estimates and cannot be verified since Google is notoriously secretive and won’t even reveal the location of its servers. Also, I knew that it probably doesn’t adjust for a lot of variables such as the fact that Google is thought to buy a lot of machines and run them slowly (they do this for a techie reason but it’s also greener as it makes them chew up less power than would otherwise occur). Since then the story has been partially debunked – Google itself has rubbished the claim and the physicist quoted in the story says he said nothing of the sort and anyway he drinks coffee, not tea.

So phew, we can all breathe a sigh of relief and dismiss it as little more than an alarmist storm in a tea (or coffee) cup?

Perhaps not. There is a case for taking this opportunity to think about the carbon footprint of our computer habits. What we do know is that since 2007 the information technology and communications industry has emitted more greenhouse gas than aviation globally – and this figure is growing.

Computers and the internet are green when it’s replacing an offline activity that would also consume energy – such as printing a newspaper or magazine or driving to the shops. However, when it’s additional activity it’s a different story. Increasingly, we get our entertainment online or we might look up an online dictionary or encyclopaedia rather than use the one already on the shelf.

People often assume that reading things online is greener than reading something printed on dead trees. The reality is that it depends on how long you read something for because of the energy consumption. If you read the newspaper for less than 30 minutes a day, it’s greener to read it online, but beyond that it’s greener to read it in print, according to Swedish researchers. Reading it on an e-reader such as Amazon’s Kindle is greener still – but that’s purely in energy consumption and doesn’t look at the entire life cycle of the gadget.

I’m not saying that we should turn our backs on such a wonderful and useful tool as the internet – EcoSalon is a website, after all! But perhaps cutting back on our dependence is not such a bad idea – and don’t forget to turn your computer off (or set it to ‘sleep’ or ‘hibernate’ mode) if you’re leaving it for any length of time too.

Image: blupic

The post Counting the Cost of Pixels appeared first on EcoSalon.