Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Times of India, your website is killing the planet!

Those publications and media organizations that tom-tom their greenness, like the Times of India and NDTV, could have a dilemma(if they are honest to their principles) on their hand -
Twenty milligrams; that's the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

This may not seem like a lot: "But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number," says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.

Wissner-Gross estimates every second someone spends browsing a simple web site generates roughly 20 milligrams of C02. Whether downloading a song, sending an email or streaming a video, almost every single activity that takes place in the virtual environment has an impact on the real one.


Will these preachy media entities now shut down their websites to save the planet? If not then can we consider them green hypocrites, like Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri?

Update- Times of India now claims that it "has emerged
as the world's No.1 English newspaper website in terms of page views
"
TOI also regularly publishes apocalyptic editorials and articles about Global Warming. In view of the new research above, they are now among top climate criminals among the media.
I ask them to either stop preaching to us unwashed masses or start practicing what they preach. Times of  India, shut down your site at once -it is killing the planet! Or else shut the f*** up about climate change.

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