In this version of the Turtle Index: carbon footprint of Google searches, cost of robberies vs tax evasion
- 340,000: barrels of oil burned by the US military per day [1].
- 0.2: grams of CO2 produced by each Google search [3].
- 140: grams of CO2 produced by traveling one kilometer in a car that meets latest EU emission standards [3].
- 36: average CEO pay as a multiple of average worker’s pay in 1976 [2].
- 131: average CEO pay as a multiple of average worker’s pay in 1993 before legislation requiring CEO salaries of public companies to be published [2].
- 369: average CEO pay as a multiple of average worker’s pay in 2008, 15 years after the legislation to correct the “problem” [2].
- 525 million: total cost in dollars of all robberies in the US in 2004 [2].
- 16 billion: total cost in dollars of all robbery, larceny-theft, and automobile theft in the US in 2004 [2].
- 24 billion: total cost in dollars of bogus insurance claims in the US in 2004 [2].
- 350 billion: total cost in dollars estimated by the IRS of underreporting on taxes in the US [2].
- 600 billion: total cost in dollars of employee theft and fraud in the workplace [2].
Sources:
- 1. “Rubber Tracks Make Military Vehicles More Efficient, Durable, Quieter”, Treehugger, Dec 15, 2008.
- 2. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational
, pp. 17, 195–96.
- 3. Powering a Google search, Official Google Blog, Jan. 11, 2009. These figures from Google are in response to an article in the Sunday Times (London) which said that it took 7gms per search and cited research of Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross. Unfortunately for the Times, Wissner-Gross emphatically states that he never even studied Google but did calculate that every second one spends online generates 200 milligrams of CO2, but that’s total for all aspects included and doesn’t consider search specifically. Wissner-Gross runs the CO2 Stats website