The LHC is 27km long and is made entirely of electromagnets which are designed to be activated and deactivated in quick succession. Actual operation of such an amount of magnets exerts 10 gigajoules of energy, or 10 billion joules. One joule of exerted force is equal to one watt of power sustained for one second.

Put simply, added to operationg power plus the cost of keeping the beam pipes at the optimal temperature of 1.7 kelvins (nigh on absolute zero) by using liquid helium, this would practically require a private power station to operate.

To estimate the carbon footprint, you would also need to know where the LHC draws it's power from. Since it straddles Switzerland and France, it is safe to assume that, given France's reputation for use of nuclear energy, the footprint is relatively low (I cannot provide figures) but the thing is, while it uses all the power it does, no matter what you do, China use thousands of tonnes of coal to get power a year. So yeah, one little country can't really make a whole lot of difference. Don't worry about it.

Druss,

don't let it get to you. Within reason you are doing the right thing, just as people who do their best to vote rationally and honestly do the right thing. At least when the forces of evil get voted in instead, the losing voters have earned the right to complain, whereas those who riot, rant, and smugly assume the moral high ground when they have been too sophisticated (read: slackly, smugly, bone idle) to vote, have, by their very action or inaction, inducted themselves into support for the very evils that they rail against. Who are they to bitch?

But, you might be objecting, what difference do I make? Don't ask me; ask George Bush. He was not elected by his followers; he was elected by the "silent majority" of his apathetic, but none the less loud and bitter opponents. As for the cost of large scale, spectacular science and technology, certainly they look big, until you look at two aspects of the accountancy.

Firstly, the whole damn lot of them put together, in all the countries around the world, are a drop in the energy consumption bucket. Even  including your LHCs and space shots, we are looking at a fraction of a percent of our energy consumption. While I do not have any figures on the comparison for only our careless consumption in sloth or in frivolity, I will guarantee that they alone outweigh worldwide investment in research into science and technology calculated to advance or salvage the state of humanity.

Secondly, space shots and the like? Wasteful? It is hard to believe that they could be anything less, watching the superb fireworks of a satellite launch, but do a little arithmetic on the economics of weather satellites alone. Probably just the hurricane tracking and prediction in the past few decades has more than paid for the entire civilian satellite launching industry. And as for broadcast satellites...

Just because we cannot see the mundane, unobvious benefits of big investments in knowledge and infrastructure, does not mean that they anything less than huge in comparison to their costs, which seen in a proper persective of the scale of our wasted resources, are pretty small change.