[LINK] Clouds of Coal

[Tom Worthington]

stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> ... Coal fuels much of internet 'cloud', says Greenpeace ...

The report "Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to
Climate Change" (Greenpeace, 30 March 2010) warns that the growth of
Internet use could cause an increase in greenhouse gas emissions:
<http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press-center/reports4/make-it-green-cloud-computing>

Unfortunately the case in the report is undermined by the way the report
is distributed: as a very poorly formatted, inefficient PDF document.
The report is a 24 page 7 Mbyte PDF document. The document is therefore
about 10 times larger than it need be and will be generating 10 times as
much greenhouse gas emissions as a properly designed document would.

While Greenpeace make a good argument about powering data centres from
renewable energy, a far greater reduction in greenhouse gas emissions
could be achieved much more quickly and cheaply by making the
applications running in those data centres more efficient. Greenpeace
might like to lead by example, and commit to efficient online documents.

More at:
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/03/coal-powered-internet-causing-climate.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890