Turning Down The Computer Screen

Saving our environment will consist of many different things. Governments must act on the macro scale to curb emissions and promote green technology when the markets refuse to do so. We as individuals must do our part as well. There are so many different actions we can take, from changing our light bulbs to fluorescents, using cloth bags for our groceries and refusing plastics, driving greener cars and now you can help by using a Google alternative called Blackle. What is that you ask and why does it make a difference?

From Gimundo:

In January, a blogger named Mark Ontkush wrote in his blog EcoIron that an all-black Google home page would save 750 megawatt-hours of electricity a year. What does that mean? We looked it up.

Turns out 750 megawatt-hours can power for an entire year:

-- 77 North American homes

-- 150 European homes

-- 268 African homes

-- 536 Asian or South American homes

-- 3,750 homes in Afghanistan

-- 6,000 televisions

-- 800 microwaves

Ontkush pointed out that an all-white Web page requires about 74 watts to display, where a black page requires only 59 watts.

In response, an Australian company called Heap Media created a Google-powered site called blackle.com. The site keeps a running total of the number of watts saved to date. At press time, that number was nearly 135 million watt-hours.

It won't make the Earth spin backwards, but like I said, every good action makes a difference. So when you need to google (which is something I do many, many times a day) remember to use Blackle and save some juice.