A scientist from Harvard tried to quantify the energy cost of a search request on internet. According to its calculation, each request releases 14g of carbon dioxide, a small amount to be multiplied by billions of searches leads to a huge environmental cost.
Internet requires millions of computer to be active, so draining energy for both their power and cooling systems equipping the rooms where they are installed. Google already took some action to reduce this environmental cost, and installed solar panels on its campus, this is nothing compare t the huge efforts require to substantially decrease the environmental cost of the Web. Once the number of computer in activity will become stable (we are reaching this point), we will gain performance while maintaining or reducing energy spending thanks to the current performance/watt scale now used by CPU manufacturers, instead of the race to ever higher clocked CPU.
So, one will be able to build infrastructure according to needs and their
