Most of us do it every day, probably multiple times, to satisfy our needs, without a thought for the cost to the environment. It seems so simple, just a click. But therein lies the seductive truth: when you Google, you spread your personal carbon footprint ever wider.

Just as the new administration in Washington is slowly turning attention to the development of cleaner energy and an awareness of our responsibility for the world and the generations to come, so is the computer world. The debate, provoked by this article on BBC  last month, is over the exact amount that it costs the universe for you to find that exact quote or factoid. Estimates range from seven grams of CO2, calculated by Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, and Google itself , where staff calculated the amount to be .2 grams CO2.

How much is that? For those not eco-savvy, it costs approximately 15g of CO2 to boil water for a cup of tea. So two searches, under the Wissner-Gross model, would equal about a cup of tea.

But searches, for those who use the Internet for a livelihood, are like the proverbial Lay's potato chip: you can't have just one--or two. Many of us may do 50 or more searches in a day, tracking down the information we need, with little thought about what impact that might have on the environment. The Times' figure estimated there could be as many as 200 million Web searches conducted in one day on earth --that's a lot of tea.

The speed of the Google search, one of the fastest on the 'Net, is attributed to the use of multiple data servers, and this is what put the company square in the Harvard physicist's sights. "If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy," he told the BBC.

Google, on the other hand, points out that by making the search process so brief, it actually saves energy: "a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ...In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query."

For the majority of computer users, the computer is just another necessary appliance like a refrigerator or a stove. Whether your day involves cooking oatmeal for one or a turkey dinner for 20, the fact is you don't calculate the cost of your cooking before you do it.

But growing awareness of the planet's dependence on individual responsibility to be 'green' includes an admonition to be thoughtful about computer use as well.

As Chris Dannen says at Fast Company, "Sure, we've learned to turn off the lights before leaving the house. But when will it become ingrained in us that playing World of Warcraft, with its processor-intensive graphics, or watching Hulu videos, which requires heavy server interaction, has a higher energy cost than tapping out a Word document?"

David JC MacKay, a professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change, puts the calculations into step by step form, coming out with the final answer that "the total energy cost of the pair of searches seems to be about 0.01 kWh. That's exactly the same as the energy used by leaving a phone charger plugged in for one day. Which is also the same as the energy used by driving an average car for one second." It's all a matter of perspective, and also a matter of cumulative totals.

Google is not the only Internet presence to create a carbon footprint, which is part of Wissner-Gross's involvement with the BBC story. The physicist is the creator of the service CO2Stats, which is self-described as a "software suite that automatically (1) monitors your site's energy usage, (2) gives you tips on how to make your site more energy-efficient (and load faster), and (3) purchases the appropriate amount of audited renewable energy from wind and solar farms. Like "hacker proof" trustmarks used by many websites to secure online payments, CO2Stats software continuously scans your website so that it can monitor your site's energy usage each time someone visits your site."

Across the globe, companies like Google are searching for answers of another kind: how to keep themselves powered up in the years to come. Google.org has invested $45 million to develop clean energy technologies, and the company is also looking into a water-based data center that would not only generate power from the waves that pass by its seven-mile-offshore facility, but use the water itself to help cool the areas its servers will occupy.

This is a discussion that will no doubt get more heated and diverse as the focus on energy sources grows in the future.

And for the record? Is it less expensive in terms of carbon footprint to read online than to print and deliver old-fashioned newspapers? Find out here as Jonathan Golob answers the question for his column in the Seattle publication The Stranger .