Not a drop to search |
LIFE keeps getting more complex and guilt-ridden by the day. As if the carbon footprint calculation was not enough to turn one into an off-grid hermit, now we have the water footprint to feel guilty about. I hereby declare you ‘guilty’, dear reader, of all the charges I am framing against all of us in this piece.
Ask me how much water I consume in a day, and I will start with the few glasses I drink, then quickly move on to the litres used for washing and bathing. Push a bit more, and I will confess to being an obsessive car washer. Some of us would mention the ‘green patch’ in the house that must be watered year-round. Push harder still, and we will grudgingly divide the 3,000 to 7,000 litres of water needed to produce each pair of denim by the period we own them to arrive at a daily average. Since I am terrible at mental math, I will do all these calculations on my smartphone to determine how much water each listed activity costs. In doing so, data centres globally will consume 0.26 millilitres, about five drops of water, for each search. Mind you, this data on water consumption pertains to regular web searches; AI searches consume more water.
It took a media outlet to take the Oregon city government to court to obtain data on........