You probably haven’t thought of a Google search as having anything to do with CO2 emissions. Well, think again.

A Harvard Professor says a typical search on Google generates about 7 grams of CO2. It may not sound like a lot but Google performs hundreds of millions of these queries every day.

The IT industry, it turns out, is not as green as one unwittingly assumes. The industry has a bigger carbon footprint than the airlines industry, according to a Gartner study.

That may come as a bit of a surprise but the truth is, global giants like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and the like rest on giant, industrial-scale server farms.

These farms are energy guzzlers in the truest sense of the term, polluting behemoths on the scale of any industrial-era factory.

Expect something like The Green Web and the Green Cloud soon as the world gets sensitized to the environment practices of the IT and the Internet industries.