[LINK] Clouds of Coal

[Richard Chirgwin]

Kim Holburn wrote:
> You'd think that there would be offsets: like the tonnage of emails  
> not sent as real letters, books or news read online instead of made  
> out of trees and transported around the place, people skyping instead  
> of going there, invoices sent electronically etc.
>
> Surely that would have some positive effect?
>   
Only maybe.

The IT industry has been very good at making people believe fuzzy nice 
things about it with the right sloganeering, and the "dead trees" line 
is probably the best example of this that exists.

The only moderately rigorous analyses I've ever seen of "dead trees 
versus Internet publishing" (I sent to Link last year, I think) were at 
best equivocal; pulping dead trees is at worst marginally more damaging 
than burning dead fossils. It may even be that dead trees have a lower 
carbon footprint than the newspaper Web presence; and of course a 
significant proportion of Australian newsprint is not a dead tree but a 
dead newspaper.

Regarding e-mail and letters, the actual carbon footprint of a single 
letter would anyway have to be vanishingly small (as is the carbon 
footprint of a single e-mail) - but without analysis, I don't think 
"e-mail is less polluting than snail mail" is a safe assumption.

As for "skyping instead of going there", it doesn't stand up to 
analysis. The state of the economy has vastly more impact on 
individual's use of air travel than the state of the communications 
network; until the GFC, air miles were still growing.

So, Kim, I'm deeply sceptical of the worth of the offsets. The industry 
likes to paint itself as green, but my feeling is that 90% of it is 
greenwash.

Richard C
> On 2010/Mar/31, at 1:26 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>
>   
>> "If considered as a country, global telecommunications and data  
>> centers
>> behind the cloud would have ranked fifth in the world for energy use  
>> in
>> 2007, behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan .."
>>
>>
>> Coal fuels much of internet 'cloud', says Greenpeace
>>
>> March 31, 2010 <http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news>
>>
>>
>> The 'cloud' of data which is becoming the heart of the internet is
>> creating an all too real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and  
>> others
>> build data centers powered by coal, according to a new Greenpeace  
>> report.
>>     
>
>