According to a post at Treehugger an avatar in Second Life uses as much electricity as the average Brazilian. To arive at this conclusion Nicholas Carr recently has done a back-of-envelope calculation comparing the impact of actual humans and Second Life avatars. You can follow the math that leads to this conclusion here but be warned, as always with these things Carr has caused a tirade of critical comment. Now whether Carr is right or not I don’t know, but the even if he’s out by a factor 10 or 100 it does beg a number of questions: Is Second Life ecologically sustainable? Should Second Life have to trade carbon offsets in the real world? And even: Should Second Life be banned by the world powers as a way of reducing CO2 emissions?