Every Google search you make, a baby seal dies in Alaska.

According to a Guardian article, so many people are using the internet, its killing the planet. Wait, I only skimmed it. Ok, so. here's the deal. It's not killing the planet yet but according to researchers:

With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year.

...A secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.

However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.

"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.

"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."

Ok, so the take away is: You might be killing baby seals every time you Google "baby seals" but Google won't tell you if you are or not and Googling "Do I kill a baby seal every time I Google baby seal?" only kills more baby seals. The solution? Use Lycos.