Well, That's a Relief

Apparently my blog is not the web equivalent of the Hummer:

In terms of direct pollution, the impact [of an individual blog on the environment] is likely to be pretty small. To provide a reference point, the popular blogging site WordPress said it transferred about 161,100 gigabytes of data last year across 3,132,606 active blogs. Do the math, and that adds up to only about 51 megabytes of data transferred per blog per year—a tiny amount. Of course, a given blogger's bandwidth will be much higher if he or she receives lots of traffic or posts large images and videos. But even those whose sites transfer a couple of gigabytes a month would be responsible for just a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Using somewhat outdated stats from the Department of Energy, that would put even one of those larger blogs somewhere in the range of the average household's microwave.

That's Slate's Jacob Leibenluft on the environmental impact of blogs and other stuff on the web (link). Works for me on two levels: one, it's another reminder of how just incredibly, jaw-droppingly cheap (in terms of marginal cost, at least) is so much ordinary web use--why people are willing to offer things like near-infinite cloudware storage and, well, and free blogs. And two, how little this point seems to have sunk in as evidenced by the fact that the question is being asked at all.