It's obvious when you stop to consider it, but Google has an environmental impact, says Atticus. But, before now, I had never stopped to consider it – with daily use, Google has become taken for granted just as much as my keyboard has. But, it seems, each time we do a Google search we set off cogs, fly wheels and pistons across the world, as Google's servers thousands of miles apart compete to deliver the answer the quickest – which is one reason each search is so speedy. And because of this, according to physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, two Google searches use as much energy as boiling an electric kettle for a cup of tea – or 15 grams of CO2. Google have been quick to rebut the scientist's findings.

"A Google search has a definite environmental impact,” said Harvard University physicist Wissner-Gross. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power... Google are very efficient, but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy."

Writing on the official Google blog, the company's Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Hölzle, begged to differ. He said that, in fact, the true figure per search is 0.2 grams, not the physicist's 7 grams. Hölzle also boasted of Google's contribution to the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, to cut "the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year."

Whatever the truth in this matter is, the IT industry does have a carbon footprint – in fact it's as large as the avaition industry's footprint. And might not cyberspace ultimately prove our downfall? As technology advances we may be able to escape into virtual worlds – which we'll want to so ever more as the real world is destroyed more and more by the fact that we want to escape it into virtual worlds, in some awfully fitting spiral of human self-destruction.

Well, in the mean time there's Blackle, a search engine that saves energy because it uses a black background, not white one – though perhaps it's not the panacea...