According to a new study conducted by Greenpeace, the Internet—everything from Facebook and Twitter to Gmail and the very website you're reading now—ravishes more fossil fuels than a large country like Russia.
Greenpeace found that data centers which store and power the Internet make up for around 2% of worldwide energy use, and that figure is growing by 12% each year.
The report, which looked at 10 of the biggest Internet companies including Twitter, Google, and Amazon to see how green they were, found that most of them weren't really that green at all. Most companies use traditional fossil fuels like coal and nuclear energy to power their data centers.
Yahoo! and Google got props for placing their facilities near clean energy spots and cutting down on its coal decency, and their support of wind and solar energy, respectively.
[via LA Times]
