3/29/08

Lights Out! Google Goes to the Dark Side...

Google isn't the first name which comes to mind when you think conservation, but all that seems to have changed when they blacked-out their page this morning to draw attention to Earth Hour (see below). Google has also "joined with others to launch Climate Savers Computing, which has a goal of reducing total power consumption by more than 50% for all computers by 2010."

It's the first time I can remember that such a amount of awareness has been raised so quickly by the search giant. So, will you be turning all your lights out this evening? Will you also be shutting down your computer?

From Google.com:

Google users in the United States will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don't do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Given our company's commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.

1 comment:

Furtheron said...

laudable on the power consumsion thing but...

Take 100% raw materials at the start and output is a computer - that computer has well less that 1% of what you started with. Truthfully one of the most wasteful production processes known - look at all the water etc. used in chip production alone...

Then after a usable life of what 5 years at best we scrap it and most of it can't really be reused / recycled.

We need to tackle some of those issues, I think the power thing is ITs way of avoiding the big issues.

 

blogger templates |