Will The Internet Eventually Black Out?

Prepare to be gob-smacked.

From John Michael Greer: "The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together (emphasis added). Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them."

So what happens when energy costs (according to Mr. Obama) "skyrocket"?

Greer: "There may well still be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the free-for-all that exists today."

I certainly hope this is wrong.