[LINK] e-documents causing greenhouse gas pollution?

[Tom Worthington]

I wrote Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:32:46 +1000 (was: "Unlawful 
discrimination by National Archives of Australia"):

>On Wednesday I received a message from National Archives of 
>Australia ... invitation to an event in the form of an image.  ...

NAA resent the invitation with readable text, which is an improvement 
over sending a JPEG image. But they also attached a 373 kbyte PDF 
version of the same information. The message is just 578 characters 
of text, with the rest mostly images.

Allowing for formatting and a modest logo, a few thousand bytes would 
be a reasonable size for such a message. Sending out a mail message 
100 times larger than it need be may seem just an annoyance. But 
consider the effect if this is a common practice for government: the 
systems will need to be sized much larger than otherwise required. As 
well as increasing the cost of the systems and inconvenience to the 
public, this could result in greatly increased generation of 
greenhouse gases from the power needed to run the computers.

On Tuesday the local energy company ActewAGL proposed a 130,000 
square metre data centre campus for Canberra 
<http://actewagl.com.au/News/Article.aspx?id=766>. ActewAGL will 
install a low CO2 emitting gas power plant when the data center gets 
large enough to support it. Even so the centre will use a lot of 
energy, about 780 MW. That will produce about 300,000 tones of carbon 
dioxide greenhouse gas per year 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/10/canberra-technology-city-proposed.html>.

I might see if I can put a bit more in my course on e-documents for 
public servants to show how to produce efficient e-documents 
<http://www.anu.edu.au/CSEM/SATOMGI_module2.php>. This might save a 
few hundred thousand tones of pollution each year.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml