Google’s recent participation in “Earth Hour” generated amusement among the staffers of National Review.
By changing its page from white to black, Google intended to spotlight a campaign to persuade people to turn their lights out for an hour. But it may have used more electricity by darkening its page. Google’s real dark side, however, is that it trims its electric bills by pilfering from the taxpayers’ pockets, as when it negotiated for concessionary electric rates from a government agency in Oregon, or when it got North Carolina to exempt it from state sales taxes on electricity.
You don’t have to look to national publications to find criticism of North Carolina’s targeted incentives toward Google.