Nick Carr, in his blog Rough Type, has a post, Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians, where he sets out to calculate the amount of electricity consumed by a Second Life avatar, which ends up being the amount consumed by the average Brazilian. The comments are fascinating as people debate his math and Second Life folk corrent the calculations about servers (vs. CPUs) used. The point still stands that the average internet user is consuming a lot of electricity – not only does her PC consume, but the servers she connects to (Second Life, Google …) are consuming electricity. Is this ecologically sustainable? Is the use of energy when computing hidden from us because we don’t have exhaust coming out of our PCs (the green-house gases come out of the coal-fired electricity plants far from us)?