Just as Steve Jobs was polishing the final draft of his defense of Apple's environmental programs, computer industry analyst firm Gartner announced to the world its findings about Global IT's carbon footprint. It's not good.
As an industry, information technology accounts for 2 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, placing it in the same club as the aviation industry.
The causes are numerous, including increasing power consumption, use of refrigerator-like cooling systems, even emissions from everyday computer displays. Gartner also uses this finding as a "wake up call" to geeks throughout the land.
Simon Mingay, research vice president at Gartner, said IT organisations will face increasing financial, environmental and legislative pressures to get more environmentally sustainable during the next five years.
Few IT management teams are aware of environmental and corporate social responsibilities policies already in place and have not mapped out the impact of the business' activities on the environment, Mingay added.
Source: BusinessWeek.
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GreenEngineer Posted 8:48 am
03 May 2007
However, unlike the aviation industry, the IT industry has the potential to reduce these contributions by an order of magnitude or more. The industry has developed very quickly, such that future costs are heavily discounted (even more so than in our culture generally). The premium has been on deploying new capability right now, and to hell with the long-term costs.
That seems to be starting to change, and there are many opportunities for energy savings, both in computer hardware design and data center design. RMI published a thorough (though now slightly outdated) book on the subject.
Airlines, on the other hand, are up against basic physics. Drag goes as the square of velocity, so you can be fast, or you can be low-impact, but it's fundamentally hard to do both. There is room for incremental improvement, certainly, but an order of magnitude improvement is probably not physically possible without changing approach (e.g. switching to airships).
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JMG Posted 3:19 pm
03 May 2007
Also, used intelligently, the IT sector can be reducing the overall travel sector significantly, which means that the 2% consumed in electricity (which could be renewably generated) could also be saving a hell of a lot of greenhouse emissions from jets.
Things like on demand printing--sending only the bytes long distance, and printing the book at the point of sale--have the potential to increase the IT emissions slightly, while overall slashing total emissions.
And, as GE points out, we're at real different points of the learning curve--we've been tinkering with internal combustion for more than a century and with jets for 60 years--there is not a lot of breakthrough potential in either technology, whereas computing offers lots of possibilities, particularly if we jack up the prices of energy enough to make it hurt to put your server farm up in the hot desert sun just so you can be near cheap hydro power. (Server farm should be underground, where the temperature is a steady 55F, with combined ground source heat pumps and aboveground solar air conditioning systems that work harder and better the hotter it is.)
Anything that can be done to shift travel from butts to bytes is a good thing for the climate.
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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