Despite its green image, Google could very well be on the way to be the biggest polluter on the planet. You may be shocked to know that at this rate the datacenters will be producing more green house gases then the world wide airline industry by 2020 according to a recent study. Primarily the gases will be due to the electricity consumed by the data canters. Google has large data centers which help it to capture snapshots of the world wide web making it faster and easier to search. Also the cached shots that we use when a website is down come from Googles own servers. Its a well known fact that in order to keep up with the growth of the world wide web, Google needs to keep increasing computers.
Its not just Google at fault though, data centers are required by each and every website or blog including this one that you are reading. Microsoft and Yahoo are not far behind google when it comes to data centers either.
The basic problem in data centers is that we don't deal effectively with the concentrated heat loads found in today's server environment. Virtually all of McKinsey's recommendations can be traced back to that, but there is nothing in their recommendations that address the underlying cause: we haven't developed strategies to minimize the waste involved in flooding huge data center spaces with cold air, in hopes that we'll deliver adequate amounts of sufficiently conditioned air to the chip.
In the old mainframe days, data centers were far more efficient but inflexible. In modern data centers, which use standardized technology from the personal computer industry, things are flexible but uncontrolled.
Solutions include becoming more efficient to powering your blog by a data center that uses renewable energy only. So maybe this would define the term Green Blog and people would be proudly be able to display if their blog was green powered.