One Cheeseburger Equals 15,000 Google Searches in CO2 Emissions | Hacker News Reader

One Cheeseburger Equals 15,000 Google Searches in CO2 Emissions

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23 pointserdemozkan26 comments

I'm going to come out and say that I consider most of those "X results in Y grams of CO2 emissions" posts/calculations/activities to be utter bullshit and a complete waste of time.

These calculations are necessarily based on very hand-waving maths. They try to focus on only one specific facet of what is absolutely and completely a systems problem. The only level at which it makes sense to talk about emissions is on a large scale like a country or even the whole world. Otherwise, you risk turning the "effort" into one of externalising carbon costs to other people's counters.

But, that's too complicated, so people will go and calculate the emissions produced in the fabrication of a cheeseburger, as if that was a useful thing to know. And then they'll write countless blog posts about it.

I submit to you that there is absolutely no value whatsoever in that calculation, or in the result of it.

Even if the calculation could be relied on, what does it mean? Is there any actionable element to this calculation? Should we do something about it? Should we care?

Counting the grams in a cheeseburger, or in a Google search, is a gimmick used to get people excited about CO2 for no particularly good reason, and with no specific result in mind. It achieves nothing other than to waste our time and provide yet another vague, shapeless concept with which people with an agenda can manipulate others into doing whatever they want.

IMO, the only reasoanble way to deal with the carbon issue is a small "sin" tax at the point where fuel is mined / imported. There are still a few corner cases, but they represent such a minute fraction of output that they are ignorable. The advantage is automacticaly account for output on everyproduct and stage of production without atempting to calculate what it's carbon history is. [You mined/imported 10 million tuns of carbon x, which you can collect from the person you sold it to and on down the chain. They can ignore the tax as it's just an increase in fuel costs to be passed to the customer.]

I also suspect the impact would on coal would be much larger than that on gas. Which is a great thing because coal is far more replaceable than gas at this point in time. You can then subsidize non carbon energy production / carbon storage equaly and let the market deside what's most effecent. You can also ignore hybrids as the government focusing on a specific solution is less effecent over time.

I heard Jeffrey Sachs saying the same thing you say: tax at the point of mining, not at the point of emission. He then went on to explain that the current focus on emissions comes from the fact that some laws or proposals regarding CO2 (carbon credits) were, without much reflection, copied from corresponding regulations about sulfur, and for sulfur you are stuck with emissions because you don't mine sulfur.

I commend you for your honesty.

It will be a TAX on every energy consumer in the world (since energy is used to produce all items including those that are exported).

It won't actually DO anything to fix the environment, just fill government coffers; the money will be use to fly VIPs around to environmental confabs on private jets.

> "It will be a TAX on every energy consumer in the world ... It won't actually DO anything to fix the environment"

Actually, it will. The use of taxes to influence consumption is well-documented. It's basic economics: price increases, demand decreases (because demand is not completely inelastic). As less products are made, less resources will be used, which helps the environment.

You don't believe that a tax on certain types of energy will incentivize various industries and processes to consume less of that energy?

"TAX on every energy consumer" (FALSE).

Not all forms of energy invovle extracting a stable form of carbon from the earth.

Nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, all provide electricity and the "carbon tax" need only apply to energy sources that are a net carbon gain. The tipping point between wind and coal is really close so a tiny subsady over several years could replace all coal power plants with wind farms over time (think 40+ years).

You might suggest that effing with electricity production is a bad idea but there are huge discrepency's between the cost of electricity around the county and it does not have much impact.

You have a point, but what such comparisons do achieve is to introduce a very rough sense of proportion in a debate that is inevitably taking place and is equally inevitably irrational.

And i bet it doesn't even take into account the methane that came from the cow that partly ended up in this particular statistic.

I think my biggest gripe was that Google searches are largely a fixed cost that scales roughly with the size of the Internets. From what I understand, the actual lookups don't add much to the energy cost. And yet, the greens would try to make people feel sinful every time they perform a Google search.

Don't get me wrong, I support being green. But if you don't have some economic sense while going about it, you're just going screw everything up for the people and then the people won't listen to you anymore.

Utterly silly. Note that the initial estimate of 7g/search is based largely on the power used by the client and includes the time to read the search results and possibly perform additional searches if the first one doesn't have what you want, while Google's retort of 0.2g/search is based entirely on the power used by their server to return one set of search results.

If the goal is to compare the environmental cost of non-essential browsing versus non-essential eating, you clearly want to use the first number. And, in which case, there's no need to single out Google, since they are probably one of the most efficient sites you could be browsing; your total server-side energy consumption will be dominated by the site to which your search results link.

(No attempt is made in either number to amortize the cost of running the internet infrastructure for an additional client, nor the cost of Google's constant spidering, which consumes resources on less efficient remote sites.)

"An average daily newspaper equals the amount of 850 Google searches."

To put it another way, one cheeseburger equals 18 newspapers.

Thanks! That one completely stumped Wolfram Alpha. (http://www49.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+cheeseburger...)

"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

Why don't we standardize this? Make a goog the base unit. We could measure newspapers in kilogoogs. (The Enquirer is 0.867 kilogoogs.) A cheeseburger would be 15 kilogoogs.

In other words, this stuff is nonsense, only good for amusement.

I bet that Google's existence actually reduces the total CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. If someone searches for a business's address and uses Google maps to find an efficient route that saves 1/2 mile of driving, the supposed allocated environmental cost is easily made up for. What if I search for a way to fix my DVD player and avoid buying a new one? How much carbon did that save?

I agree with everybody that these stats are absurd. But, even if they were somehow meaningful, the point that information access allows people to consume less must be taken into account.

Yeah, but "I can has 15,000 Google Searches" just doesn't sound the same.

Besides the fact that that this could all be completely untrue, it's a useless stat unless you know the number of burgers consumed/second vs google searches/second.

Does that statistic take into account all the greenhouse gasses the cows emit through flatulence? If not, the number might be a little higher...

Cow farts are carbon neutral. Grass sucks the carbon out of the atmosphere, cows turn carbon into dinner and flatulence, carbon re-enters the atmosphere. Get rid of cows, and you'll have grass fires returning that carbon to the atmosphere.

Yes but not all carbon is created the same. The methane from cow farts has much greater greenhouse potential than CO2, CO, and soot from grass fires.

I can't believe I'm seriously posting about cow farts. Must get back to work. Must. get. back. to. work.

Methane is a much more dangerous greenhouse gas than co2 alone.

Eating less meat will make a bigger impact than driving less.

Yes, and properly pastured cattle sequester carbon dioxide as well.This doesn't mean the methane issue goes away, but if we could eat less meat, make CAFOs go away, and raise cattle in a more sustainable manner, I think we'd come out ahead.

I am a little puzzled here--how do properly pastured cattle sequester co2? If you do grass farming, the cattle's manure will fertilize the grass, but I wonder if there is a net sequestration in the process.

Carbon neutral but not global warming neutral. Methane is worse, like 1000 times worse, per molecule, than CO2.

If people shift from eating beef to eating beans aren't they simply redirecting the methane emissions from one rectum to another? (In a manner of speaking).

I'm getting sick of these eco-green fanatics. I wonder what are they doing. Are they living in a cave isolated from the rest of the world?

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