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Greenpeace Says the Internet Emits Too Much CO2
Pharmboy writes "A new report put out by Greenpeace argues that the IT sector is not doing enough to decrease reliance on 'dirty energy', saying the Internet, if it were treated as its own country, would be the 5th largest emitter of greenhouse gases. 'Many companies, the organization said, tightly guard data about the environmental impact and energy consumption of their IT operations. They also focus more on using energy efficiently than on sourcing it cleanly.' The report (PDF) doesn't mention how much CO2 is saved by telecommuting and higher corporate efficiency, however. So, exactly how 'green' or 'polluting' is the internet, really?"
So, exactly how 'green' or 'polluting' is the internet, really?
The more important question is, how exactly does one "choose" a green energy source. I don't know about other parts of the world, but up here in Canada we generally only have one choice of power provider. We don't get to shop around for which power plant we want to produce our power. I guess if you are big enough to be able to "choose a location for the new datacenter" then you kinda can... but for the large majority of users not so much.
Yes, there are alternatives, but they arn't ready for the masses yet. Doing anything for power besides paying the going rate in your local area is at best risky. Unless you can use it as a PR piece effectively to the point of being worth it or it saves your more money over a reasonable amount of time, no one is going to go for it.
The report (PDF) doesn't mention how much CO2 is saved by telecommuting and higher corporate efficiency, however.
Greenpeace.. biased.. who'd have seen that one ;)
Seriously though, while I agree with some of the greenpeace message... I have very little respect for the organization and have a hard time taking anything they say seriously.
We should eliminate them immediately, less the planet die!
No more news at 11.
How much CO2 does Internet usage SAVE? How about not driving to work 3 days a week and working from home remotely? Methinks the Internet has a net improvement on CO2 emissions.
Would it help if we could plug-up some of them tubes?
Greenpeace emits too much hot air.
Greenpeace just like any other group with a political agenda (like NRA, Sierra Club, PETA, MADD) has to provide the shock value to get its point across. How many more pieces of paper would be wasted if it weren't for the ability to send email or post on grandma's wall. Sending or writing a check is nearly extinct. Sure we have a heck of a lot plugged in, but servers are becoming exponentially more efficient as time progresses. With technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization, the peak load of infrastructure has promise to slowly decrease over the next decade. Remember the internet, as far reaching as it is, is still a relatively young technology that is getting its legs under it. Give it time, and the cost of powering all of those servers slowly moves companies to reduce their consumption or supplement with sustainable green power.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
"The internet" is a vague term and isn't even what the report is about. The report is about IT operations. Sure if you combined all the datacenters in the world their carbon footprint would be HUGE, but then...let's consider the alternative. Let's start by storing all those TPS reports on paper. Billions of reams of paper, probably. We're going to need boxes or file drawers and folders to put them in. And warehouses in which to store them, which we can build to replace the forests we cut down to make the paper. Then of course there's the cost of transporting all this stuff wherever it's needed...that's a lot of gasoline. E-mail would be a lot less wasteful, but hey....Greenpeace is chiding us about producing too much pollution with our e-mail. So we'll FedEx those papers. Jet planes aren't nearly as bad on the environment.
Seriously. There are bigger things they could be tackling. If anything, Greenpeace should be pushing for MORE dependence on networking and IT and a trying to draw the world away from relying so much on paper. Fix THAT problem, then talk about IT.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Greenpeace's collective mouth hole emits to much CO2, maybe the should just stop breathing!
I really stopped respecting or listening to them when they got in bed with PETA and the Voluntary Human Extinction movement...
Why should anyone care what Greenpeace says?
Can't do nuclear, can't put windmills up due to the birds or hurting the value of the Kennedy compound. Ethanol doesn't work. Honestly, I don't think the environmentalists will be happy until we're back to living in caves and dying at around age 25 from famine.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
So "The Cloud", is fairly far from the top two energy consumers, US and China. No simple breakdown as to how "green" easy consumer is, though a later table lists non/renewable usage for countries, but not The Cloud...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Greenpeace is detrimental to the environmentalism movement.
Obviously Al Gore felt really guilty about all the pollution his invention has caused. This explains why he's had such a focus on the environment and climate change. He's just trying to balance it out.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Why validate the opinions of an organization that has been banned from a variety of countries and towns around the world? It's like asking the mob their opinion on small caliber firearms. Would you really want them involved?
You asshole!
Where is the:
-1 Ideological Terrorist
Option? I'd love to be able to use this for future Greepeace and PETA articles.
Both organizations have a lot in common:
- Gross disregard for others rights if it interferes with their own agenda
- The embracement of "Shock" tactics as a means of furthering their "message"
- The subversion of ideological ideas to the extreme to the exclusion of common sense.
I mean, hey, Shit is Organic, Locally Harvested, and its consumption would lower worldwide pollution of our Oceans and Aquifers, but I don't see anyone advocating it.
As a card carrying Vegetarian and someone who DOES try to lower my environmental impact on the planet (not negate, that is impossible without ceasing to exist), these groups went from being interesting when I was younger, to being downright scary in their Fundamentalist beliefs, and being outright wack-jobs who have lost their way, and whatever mandate they thought they had.
If they would shut up, we would be just fine.
It's obviously ok for Greenpeace to use it to get their message out in PDF?
Why don't they write it on fallen leaves and let the wind carry their message around.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
If they want to get people to quit using the net, they should lead by example.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Obviously Greenpeace wants people to rage... you want to rage? Don't look at the internet's total power consumption, look at how much of that consumption is caused just by spam or other illegitimate traffic.
Look, using energy efficiently is doing something good for the environment. Until that mythical time when all our power comes from sources that don't cause global warming, emit pollution, create radioactive waste, kill birds, destroy desert ecologies, require materials that have to be mined, disrupt fish lives, or look bad, reducing power usage is reducing environmental impact.
Moreover, if I'm running a data center, it's up to me how much I work at saving energy. If I'm getting it from a utility, I have a lot less ability to control how they get their power. Think globally and act locally, guys.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
and without internet they expected this news to propogate...how exactly? carrier pigeons and snail mail?
Earth used to have a CO2 atmosphere until this new form of life (plants) showed up and started spewing O2 into it as waste bi-product from their "photosynthesis".
Some people are just trying to restore Earth to its natural state. How much greener can you get than that?
Slow roasted Greenpeace over a hickory smoked fire. Famous Dave's Devil's Spit barbecue sauce slathered all over, popping and sizzling in the hot coals as it slowly drips. Next to it, a rack of Greenpeace ribs slathered in the same sauce, cooks to perfection as it fills the air with a smokehouse aroma.
over a hot fire
I can't wait to take a bite
Greenpeace is cooking
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Greenpeace finds people produce too much CO2. To solve this issue as well as world hunger, they have decided to introduce a low cost food source Soylent Green.
I'll be foregoing my normal donation to you this year, and spending it on MMORPGs and cloud storage instead.
Sincerely,
The Internet
I have been telecommuting for two years. Certainly the gas savings need to be considered. But there's more. For the past year, vie mostly purchased ebooks and emagazines. How many trees saved? How much fuel for shipping saved?
Bottom line is that any comparison like this is exceedingly complex. Simpleminded people do simpleminded studies and get inane results.
Greenpeace falls among the naysayers: "you can't do that". If they actually provided some realistic concrete alternatives, I might actually give them some consideration. As it stands now, as soon as they identify themselves with green peace, I stop listening.
Are they running out of things to obsess over? Do all of their boats run on fusion energy? How "Green" are they now that they have me thinking about it?
Has Greenpeace calculated reduced fuel consumption due to decreased snail-mail volume? Reduced travel CO2 due to IM, video-conference, and other IP-based technology? The contribution of computing to developing greener technologies?
Run those calcs and get back to us.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Greenpeace should take down their website then; they are contributing to the problem.
How much more CO2 would be generated if I ...mailed 50 letters a day across the country/world? ...My servers printed out their logs instead of sending them electronically to a syslog server? (any mainframers also remember these days?) ...I drove to the mall/bookstore/music store etc.. I needed to purchase something. ...had to buy a new set of encyclopedias every year ...had to create plastic overheads (aka "foils" to some) for every presentation ...mailed individual pictures to all of my family of my recent vacation ...mailed my taxes in via USPS instead of electronically.
Anybody know what type of infrastructure Greenpeace uses?
Considering Greenpeace has a website themselves and one that runs a windows stack (as well plenty of bloat inducing javascript), I think they should be looking at what they can do to stop emitting CO2. Let me know when they pull the plug or at least rebuild their site using only assembly.
About Greenpeace, a theater troupe whose desire for headlines outweighs any real contribution to the debate.
The internet, as a whole, is only the fifth most polluting entity?
For a world-spanning corporation with massive servers, that's pretty darn good.
As an aside, IT companies redue their dependency on the internet? HA
Sent from my CR-48
Is there any needed life supporting resource that this outfit will not try to destroy? This is another fabricated story by them and wholly without scientific foundation.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
And Greenpeace is the second leading emitter of Bullshit. PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals?) Trumps them in first place.
"...saying the Internet, if it were treated as its own country, would be the 5th largest emitter of greenhouse gases."
Uh, OK, that's one hell of a way to look at it. Gee, if I put every single car in it's own "country", I'll bet it would be one of the worlds largest consumers of rubber tires too. Go figure.
Anyone can lump a bunch of shit together, but it takes a true idiot to lump a bunch of shit together that would never occur naturally in the first place and then start hitting the global warming panic button. Morons.
Oh, and thanks a lot there, Al Gore. The internet may not be your invention, but I'll gladly pin this clusterfuck on your ass.
http://greenpeace.org is a great place to start. ... and nothing of value was lost.
A new study says Greenpeace activists are not showing any sign of reducing their CO2 emission while breathing.
These F***ers always gripe that energy isn't clean enough... It hurts the environment... There isn't ONE energy source these dumb asses find acceptable!
Pick any energy source and do a search. You will find some environmentalist griping about it.
If they want to live in a dark cave licking algae off the walls then they are more than welcome to do it. I want a nice temperature controlled house, big, fast cars, fattening foods and lots and lots of cheap energy!!!
Article didn't seem to mention it, but do they consider the offset the internet provides? A lot of people shop online now, so instead of spending the gas to go buy a CD or something else, it's instead downloaded digitally or ordered online; I don't have the stats to back it up, but I would think that mass shipping is more efficient than a hundred individuals driving to the mall.
suck my great green donkey dick.
Time and time again they lie, and they are no longer about the environement. They are about using corporation as whipping boys so they can drum up volunteers and money, even if they lie about it.
They lost there way in the 80s, and really aren't worth anyones time.
And I say that as a former member.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And most of the internet thinks green peace is emitting too much hot air.
Greenpeace is not attacking the internet. They're simply trying to get big server farms to start thinking about environmental impact. None of the bias in the summary is in TFA.
The poster implies that telecommute-based work is necessarily reducing the carbon footprint, but there is not a lot of evidence to support this. Yes, you reduce your commute times, but you also increase resource consumption in your home - resources that are possibly duplicated in your house. More significantly, it's been shown that telecommuning is causing more egress from the cities into the suburbs or the country - areas where, typically, people have LARGER carbon footprints - larger commutes from home to grocery stores, etc. One also tends to have larger amounts of land and houses, which ultimately displaces co2-offsetting trees.
They can shut down their servers and help make the internet a bit greener.
We'll go back to delivering information by sending everybody thick heavy bundles of paper, then. I'm sure that'll be much greener.
It's 2011. Someone still believes in:
1) Anthropogenic global warming
2) CO2 = pollutant/contributor to global warming
3) "We must reduce our carbon footprint!"
4) "Buy carbon credits!"
They're even teaching this nonsense in schools. Now your kids, and an entire generation of impressionable youths, will become useful idiots in the Green Cult.
In fact, I can see that some of you folks are already rank and file members of the Green Cult.
That's right. Go right ahead and continue with your heroic, altruistic efforts to save the f**kin' planet.
George Carlin is laughing at you.
Greenpeace is no longer an attack upon pollution. It is an attack upon the concept of wealth.
Greenpeace has a problem with Internet energy use only when it doesn't serve Greenpeace, its political activities, and its ability to indulge in the great human urge to tell others what to do. Greenpeace, like the Sierra Club ('wilderness is for rich people only") and PETA ("let's get naked and pipe-bomb universities"), has become an embarrassment and a liability to the concepts of environmentalism and conservation. They help the cause of environmentalism about as much as a parade of drag queens dressed in rubber nun outfits masturbating each other whenever the traffic lights turn red help obtain gay rights.
There was a time, long ago, when I supported Greenpeace. But now... they ARE the problem. You can't make changes by alienating the mainstream, no matter how much of "I'm a rebel!" gives you a hard-on when you look in the mirror.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
so it's going to be difficult to get my Earth Day tire fire started. But I will keep trying. It's too important!
Greenpeace. MADD. PETA. At some point the folks running those organizations realized there was good money in ostensibly working towards a cause that no one could disagree with. Now they're all just run by self serving publicity whores, all chanting the same mantra of "Give us money, or else you hate (mother earth) (grieving mothers) (cute puppies), and you wouldn't want to be known as someone who hates (mother earth) (grieving mothers) (cute puppies) this close to re-election season, would you?"
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Too much hot CO2, right?
...and everyone in the IT sector rolled their eyes and made the jerk off motion.
I'm an environmentalist but I refuse to support Greenpeace because of their history of violence. There is absolutely no excuse for that kind of behavior.
Okay look, if you want to bash on Greenpeace, bash on the facts and stop committing ad hominem attacks. How can we fix the global climate change if no one reads the original report and address that? The Slashdot summary and the linked article are both gravely insufficient.
The slashdot summary also is misleading:
"The report (PDF) doesn't mention how much CO2 is saved by telecommuting and higher corporate efficiency, however."
And yet the article itself address this in several learning points, the most important one is bolded below:
Data centres to house the explosion of virtual information
currently consume 1.5-2% of all global electricity; this is growing
at a rate of 12% a year.
The IT industry points to cloud computing as the new, green
model for our IT infrastructure needs, but few companies provide
data that would allow us to objectively evaluate these claims.
The technologies of the 21st century are still largely powered by
the dirty coal power of the past, with over half of the companies
rated herein relying on coal for between 50% and 80% of their
energy needs.
IT innovations have the potential to cut greenhouse gas
emissions across all sectors of the economy, but IT’s own
growing demand for dirty energy remains largely unaddressed by
the world’s biggest IT brands.
And what's worse, this isn't about telecommuting, it's about cloud computing! They are two different things that do not mean exactly the same thing! So the summary is basically diverting attention away from cloud computing, and the original report by Greenpeace directly admits there's no data here. Greenpeace did not willfully omit data, as the summary suggests. The fact that there is no data here is a problem for companies and the planet, not for Greenpeace's report!
And finally, to address your statement of "how does one choose a green energy resource." Answer: lots of ways
1) Vote for politicians that support and direct resources to green energy
2) Pick companies that only use green energy, in this case, cloud companies that use servers that are powered by green energy.
3) In the US, we have many states that have been trying to introduce energy competition where you can chose your energy generator. While most attempts are pretty woeful, we are trying to introduce "choice" to the masses.
4) Large companies in the US often have many choices. Some companies generate part or all of their own power, and some chose specifically where their power comes from if their physical plant is large enough and has certain requirements. We can influence this choice by choosing companies that chose green energy.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Well, yeah. Using energy efficiently saves them money. Sourcing it cleanly can cost them money.
At least there is a lot of effort for flops/watt or even better apps/watt (also including HVAC capacity and daily costs) lately. That's such a huge win over 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Hey Green Peace "Kiss my hairy yellow ass!"
Conservative, mod down for violating
The people on the Greenpeace ships roam the world having the life of Riley, grabbing headlines, doing heroic things with expensive toys, paid for by mugs like you who slog their guts out 40 hours a week doing an awful job.
In the end, it achieves nothing except keep a bunch of people, who haven't yet grown, from having to work.
I'll grant you that their exploits are exciting to watch and read about. Looks like fun!
The problem with the methodology of greenpeace is that the energy used to power the "internet" (data centers, switching centers, telcos etc) is already accounted for all over the place, so it makes not sense to refer to it as a wholly independent entity. Now, talking about internet companies energy usage is a complete different beast worth of consideration.
If we switch the internets to solar power, we won't be able to surf the webz after dark. Thank you but Id rather emit CO2 than give up midnight net pr0n.
So Greenpeace doesn't like Apple (expect to hear a lot more about that one soon,) they don't like video games and they _especially_ don't like Nitnendo, and now they hate the Internet?
Are they intentionally trying to make everyone hate them? I'm not saying that popular things should be immune to criticism, but there's a right way to do so, and Greenpeace seems to be trying to find the exact opposite way of doing it.
If you want to make a difference you need to find actual problems so that even if the initial claim sounds outrageous anyone but the most rabid fanboy will look at the evidence and say "you know, they're actually kinda right." Instead with Greenpeace's strategy everyone initially says "that doesn't sound right", checks the "evidence" and concludes "no, it totally isn't right."
You can get away with boosting your publicity by making outrageous and mostly unfounded accusations against a minority, because most of the majority won't feel any need to defend that minority against the attack. The gains you make for getting the attention of the majority will make up for pissing off the minority. However Greenpeace seems to be trying to piss off not one but multiple large groups of people. I'm sure everyone who doesn't play video games, doesn't own an iPhone and doesn't use the internet loves them right now. Exactly how large and influential is that particular combination?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
"Tightly guard" seems like a bit of an overstatement. More like "have no idea concerning".
They have a point - how many data centre's besides some of the large new builds have pue figures of around 1.2 - i.e. anywhere near those for efficient data centres?
There is still a level of complacency in many companies that in the drive for computing power it is acceptable to use as much power as required but this ignores all the massive extra waste. In theory all the energy used should convert directly to computing power but in reality large amounts is wasted, making the power supplies stable with inefficient UPS designs, cooling because processors and hard drives give off so much waste heat, the waste heat being thrown away by the data centres whilst traditional air con cools the ambient environment of the server rooms.
The companies who are complacent are exactly the people who should be targeted by environmentalists.
I'm guessing the internet is a lot more energy efficient than the manufacture of the floppy disk I need to store my file and the gas used by the courier to take it to another location.
-Create a car that runs on sunshine and rainbows and only emits water and smiles. They couldn't create a car powered by smiles because those whiny bastard don't know fun from a hole in the ground.
-Create a power source that doesn't pollute, isn't harmful, and will never run out
-Take their website offline. If they aren't part of the solution, they are part of the problem
-Renounce all plastics
-Create a media player/phone where the assembly workers make $100 per hour, have promotion based on race, gender, and victim status; and the production of which requires zero energy, zero natural resources, and can be shipped to anyone who wants it without using energy or polluting.
They are great at criticizing, but really lame when it comes to actually delivering anything of value that meets their own standards. I have no respect for them and they can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.
Pre-internet people had to go from store to store to do comparison shopping based off of quality and price. Now we can do the research before we even get in the car. Heck, sometimes we don't even get into a car. Sometimes we just get it delivered by a UPS driver on his daily rounds.
Plus now that it is easier to comparison shop. it is easier to evaluate other features like energy efficiency in the products we buy.
From TFA:
That’s more power than Russia uses, according to a new report about cloud-computing from Greenpeace.
Computer servers in data centers account for about 2% of global energy demand, growing about 12% a year, according to the group. The servers, Greenpeace said, can suck up as much power as 50,000 average U.S. homes.
So they are saying that servers use as much power as 50,000 US homes, which is more power than Russia uses.
Which implies that 50,000 USA households use more energy than 53 million Russian households, plus industrial and transportation use.
I know the USA has a high per-capita energy footprint, but that sounds a little ridiculous.
And in the Greenpeace report, they say:
It is challenging, however, to find data on the actual net impacts of
applied IT technologies due to information gaps and a multiplicity of
variables, as well as a lack of transparency around the lifecycle
impacts of IT’s own growing emissions and rising electricity use.
So they are saying that real numbers are hard to find, so instead they just made them up?
And finally, they say that companies need to not just reduce power, but need to use green sources like solar. They mention a 100MW datacenter, even if a company was willing to spend $2B creating a "green" solar plant to power their datacenter, would Greenpeace be ok with them flattening 2000 acres (3 squares miles) of land to build the solar power plant?
You asshole!
Uh... that would be methane (CH4), not CO2.
Obviously they're not serious about the environment. If they were, they'd avoid reproducing and off themselves at the earliest opportunity. Less people = less pollution, plain and simple. So, therefore, they must have some other agenda (or be insane).
Right on!
See, when you're dead all the important organs required to laugh, including the brain, have this nasty habit of rotting off in a way that inhibits laughter.
Sometimes shrugging off evidence and flipping off the world is wisdom, sometimes its just stupidity. I do know that for all the claims coming from certain quaters of the U.S. poltical scene that there is a green/gay "agneda" which is so powerful and dominant that it has wrapped up 90%+ of the world's scientists in its conspiritorial grips, global tempatures continue to rise.
-GiH
Overall, things are likely to be for the better. Sure people waste electricity and pollute the environment by watching cats on their ipad, but the internet as a whole helps assets and money become more liquid and is able to facilitate many efficiency boosting processes.
Should we tone things down a bit? Yes, but that goes for the entire economy worldwide too. It's about time we stop believing the story of economic growth.. hit stability, keep things efficient and make money by doing what the free market is supposed to - improving things. The internet is an improving force, not one that gets bailouts or floods the Gulf of Mexico.
Leave my internets alone, fix your own shit. And just fuck you, Greenpeace - you regularly-misinformed, doublespeaking, donation-grubbing, harass-me-in-person-at-times fucktards.
a goog habit like planting trees can save us from getting our country polluted
Did they subtract all of the driving miles saved by telecommuters?
Did they subtract the airline miles saved by teleconferencing?
Did they subtract the miles I didn't drive by using Netflix instead of driving to the video store?
Did they subtract the trees saved by buying fewer newspapers and books?
Did they subtract the miles saved by on-line shopping versus driver to three store to compare prices?
My guess is that after you subtract all of these significant factors, the Internet is closer to a wash for the environment.
E-waste might be another story.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Is full of shit. But not nearly enough. Shit on them and fill'em up so they'll stop bothering anyone.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
They look only at raw costs, not at opportunity costs. If we got rid of the Internet, then Greenpeace's announcement that the Internet creates too much CO2 would be printed on paper and shipped around in gas-powered vehicles. Their press conference announcing it would have to be covered by reporters who burn fuel driving there and back. It's virtually guaranteed to have a higher CO2 footprint the old way.
Same goes for nuclear power. People always look at just the downsides of nuclear power all on their own. They never get around to comparing it to alternative power sources. If you do that, nuclear ends up being the safest and cleanest power source per TWh available to us.
Cars are actually one of the few topics where people get it right. Nobody looks at an EV and is aghast that it requires 35 kWh to go 100 miles (more than your house uses in an entire month). They compare it to their gasoline car and see that its energy is only 1/3rd the cost for the same distance.
When you're comparing to zero instead of alternatives, everything looks bad. Even breathing.
Hopefully this means Greenpeace will not longer use the Internet. Or their computers for that matter.
Oh, pffbbbbttttt! Please! You and your... your... FACTS! Get out of here!
What creates less value?
The Internet as a whole?
Or the Internet arguing over yet another idiotic pronouncement by profoundly surreal protest-theater majors?
Maybe I'm the only one that uses Google as the web browser homepage, but with this news article in mind, it's quite evil to have an animation on the main page for Earth Day.
I call them that since I'd like to think real environmentalists actually care about solutions.
At any rate eco-freaks are all about problems, not solutions. Part of the reason is that this is easy. Everything, and I mean everything, has a downside, a cost of some sort. There is nothing that is all good no bad. As such it is easy to just point out the bad in any solution. Someone says "How about we do this?" you find the bad and point it out. You can hate on everything that way.
Much harder is to come up with solutions to problems, and to then weigh all the alternatives and find the one with the least (or the most acceptable costs). It is easy to just shout down everything and then pretend like you are doing good.
By some estimates they using a couple percent of the national energy grid to drive hundreds of millions of server cores and disks. On the other hand, the computer data companies and chip companies are acutely aware of the expensive power they are consuming and trying to minimize it & costs. Google has the ironic position of being the largest consumer of data center electricity and at the same time the most efficient consumer of electricity per peta-op or peta-byte.
I heard the president of Stanford, a CPU designer entrepreneur, give a talk at the MIT 150th anniversary on the energy tradeoffs of various parallel computing designs - multi-threading, multi-core, and multi-CPU. Some results were not what you predicted. Good multi-threading is promising because its more computer done per exisitng gate count.
We must return to what was used before the internet existed. Station wagons full of magtapes.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Yes, IT uses a lot of energy. It's not just "the Internet", its all kinds of research, supercomputers, archives, etc. They have a valid point that there is significant waste in IT, and there's currently a great deal of research into reducing the energy required to power say, a supercomputer and its super data requirements. There are also tons of conservation efforts with companies telling their employees to turn their workstations off, use the power saving tools to automatically turn off screens / hard drives, MAID research, more efficient water cooling methods, using the outside air to cool a data center when it's cold rather than making cold air, etc.
IT business is still business. Clean tech adds cost right now. Using power efficiently reduces cost. Right now it makes more business sense to use the cheapest power you can, and use as little of it was possible. When a clean tech catches up in price terms, I'm sure you'll see a pretty big exodus - nobody wants to pollute, but they do want to stay in business.
We have less travel to biz conferences in my company because we use the ever-improving tele-video services. Likewise fewer customers visit physical stores and use the internet.
We currently in the "paradox stage" where building the infrastructure appears to be increasing resource use. But in the longer term this may reduce resource use. This is similar to the "productivity paradox" of the early 1980s and 1990s were desktop computer costs did not seem reduce the cost of doing business right away, but appeared to be increasing the cost.
As long as they don't try to attack my computer, I appreciate their input.
Lawless jerks.
Step 1: Nobody buys any more computers to help reduce CO2 emmissions
Step 2: Scientists finish quantum computing in the dark
Step 3: Everyone buys quantum computers
Step 4: PETA (that's People for the Ethical Treatment of Atoms, not the other one) gets upset about the enslavement of atoms for our purposes.
Step 5: Apocalypse
It's ridiculous to expect individual companies or even people to control how their power gets generated and how much or little pollution that produces. In most cases this isn't even information that is available - what you often get are feel-good measures that don't even necessarily do anything for the environment. The only way pollution will decrease is by putting a price to pollution that is high enough that if people go by their wallet, they will automatically be green. Everyone already pays attention to prices so it is a 1-step solution that is guaranteed to work - there is no problem in coming up with a scheme for reducing emissions. The real problem is that the world wants to talk about reducing CO2 emissions without actually doing so because it is expensive - it is all about feel-good measures. Going after internet companies or even gas companies in particular for a society-chosen problem is asinine. It's not about them there polluters (who are not you), it's about your wallet, whomever and wherever you are. Greenpeace is seriously confusing the issue by talking about particular sectors as though it is not the whole of society who has decided that pollution in the form of CO2 is free of charge.
Someone with mod-points needs to cancel out that troll rating. The parent comment is not a troll.
So, let's get this straight, internet uses a LOT of power... which I think most of us already knew. They go to very extensive lengths to demonstrate how much power these companies are using, and then chide them for... trying to lower their power usage?
But no, every company IT group is supposed to be Google, creating their own wind farms. Most company IT groups have to justify the the money spent on anti-virus scanners, nevermind having the budget to build anything. It should be noted that it's very difficult for companies to become power traders, and google spent many years working on it before it happened. If it was all that important to them, they would focus this energy on lobbying the people who can actually build renewable power sources, not the dregs and their small company IT farms.
... It's Greenpeace looking for some way to be relevant after the halt of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
I think the only 4 ecology organizations that are worthwhile are Ducks Unlimited, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and the Audubon Society. The rest are attention whores.
--
BMO.
Well, it's not a country. It's nothing like a country. It's a network that services nearly the entire populated world. This kind of rhetoric is as meaningless as the average Slashdot car analogy.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If a large percentage of the cars on the road were to instantly swap to electric cars, where is all of that power going to come from? If you have an electric car, should you also only use green energy?
If, God forbid, electric cars SHOULD take off, they'll give them 5 or so years of free ride before they make their "electric cars produce too much CO2!" pronouncement, and demand that people stop driving all together.
I burn two gallons of gasoline every single day to commute to my job where I do nothing but sit in front of a computer and use network connections. *sigh*
It's not going to get any better until legislation is passed that forces companies to do things better.
Let's see how the trendy climate alarmists react now that the greenies are going after them.
Understand this, the radical environmentalists will not be satisfied until we're living in caves. But they're not the real problem, they are the useful idiots of the authoritarians who want to control every aspect of our lives.
EVERY action of EVERY human being causes CO2 to be released. They are demonizing it because it's a way to control every aspect of our lives.
I'm not falling of it, I hope that you're not either.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Perhaps Greenpeace should lead by example then and stop using the Internet altogether.
Thought not.
I'm sure that Green Piss is so interested in being green that they will shutdown their website. I guess not as being part of the problem has never been an issue with green peas in the past.
Not here, I've never even heard of anything PETA did except here on Slashdot, but I saw Greenpeace locking onto a steam converter for a nuclear plant.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Add more filters to the Internet!!
the Internet, if it were treated as its own country,
And there's your problem, right there. If you start with a nonsensical assumption, then your result is nonsensical, even if it sounds like it makes sense.
"a horse, if it were treated as a mobile phone..." - does that make it clear? No matter what you say after that, it's bullshit.
The Internet isn't a country. And it is not in the same category as countries. A county, or a group of countries, like the EU, you can "treat as as a country" in many (but not all) respects, because they are in the same category. A computer network is not in any sense similar to a country.
Why is that important? Well, among other things, because the CO2 emissions of "the Internet" are already included in the countries where the server farms stand. You can't just extract them out and add them as their own table row. Two, different from countries, there is no binary assignement. Every hosting center also has some non-Internet machines, some the majority. What about mobile phones and PCs, i.e. the end systems? Count or not? What about construction, satellites (and their launches), etc.? Once you so much as start to think about it, you realize how much interpretation there is.
Essentially, it's a made-up number.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...it emits too much methane. Seriously guys, couldn't you have taken that outside??
The worldwide road system, if counted as a country, would be the single largest emitter of CO2.
If they had their way, we'd all be living in a cave, sharpening our sticks on rocks and chatting around by the campfire. Oh wait, the campfire emits CO2... damn. Never mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SFVeBUPo94
I said 'operationally' not infrastructure. There's CO2 cost in *everything*
Exactly, so perhaps a better comparison is what would be the CO2 cost of NOT having the current network infrastructure? This would result in far more paper mail which has to be physically transported, more business trips because of poorer communications etc. Perhaps Greenpeace ought to consider that too.
observation.
Greenpeace want to STFU if they did not produce so much hot air the world would be a lot cleaner (by the Original and true Rainbow Warrior) the one greenpeace stole the name from for that insult of a ship boy am i glad that went down
Looking at the UN's list of countries by CO2 emissions (conveniently sorted on wikipedia), we see that Japan is holding the #5 spot, with 1.25 billion metric tonnes annually and Russia is at #4, with 1.53 billion metric tonnes. Let's assume that "the internet" falls just behind Russia, and has roughly the same amount of pollution as it does.
Now, according to Internet World Stats, there are an estimated 1.9 billion people on the internet. That means that "the Internet" emits less than 0.8 metric tonnes of CO2 per capita annually. For what it's worth, that's not even twice what an average adult human being produces each year just by being alive.
However... checking wikipedia's list of countries by industrial carbon dioxide emissions per capita, we see that 0.8 metric tonnes per capita would put it somewhere between Swaziland, which is #157 on the list, and Paraguay, which #162. (I know that it's wikipedia and you can't count on wikipedia always being accurate, but these numbers are fairly easy to verify by dividing the UN's totals from the previous reference by each country's population. A cursory examination doesn't show any obvious errors, and if the numbers are wrong, I can't see them being out by an amount that would significantly alter my conclusion, below. If somebody else does have verifiable facts and figures that would contradiction my conclusion, please feel free to respond).
So per capita, "the internet" is in the lowest 30%, worldwide... which while it may not be as perfect as some would like it to be, is still pretty damn good. So who wants to break it to Greenpeace that their newly declared "public enemy" is actually one of the world's best in the world at keeping things green?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's bullshit semantics to buy "clean" power. Electrons are electrons and they all go in to one giant pot called the transmission grid. Paying a premium for "guilt free" certification is just a fancy 501(c)3 donation so rather than donating on your utility bill why not get tax deductions while you're at it?
The real question is why aren't they cutting consumptions? I find it hard to believe that the silicon valley can't use some dark fiber to connect a port/harbor with an offshore submarine water-cooled facility. Give it nuclear power, OTEC, Photovoltaic, wave, wind or otherwise, but with water cooling the energy cost reduction will be dramatic. The legal/security benefits of a submarine facility are just another perk.
I'm waterproofing a mini-ITX right now for water immersion so I know it can be done.
greenpeace is nothing more than a cult for disenchanted young people that need to belong.their hypocrisy is limitless.every server that they use is powered by coal and nuclear energy.and where would they be without facebook? the leaders sit back and let their cronies make spectacles out of them selves while they rake in tons of donation monies.can anyone find out who sits at the top of this circus and what they pay in taxes.im going to keep digging until i find out.ive posted on their page my pro nuclear opinions and was deleted immediately it is their way of controlling the exchange of information.censorship on par with with the nazi's or any other radical regime..ignorance and fear of everything is what they promote.i challenge every greenpeace member to live what they preach and live off the grid.no dirty powered cell phones,computers,cars,lights,heat.for more go to...https://www.facebook.com/pages/nuke-roadie/186860624662864.
Once upon a time, I was a bicycle messenger for a while. It was a fascinating job, but even all that time ago, the industry (profession?) was clearly at the start of its twilight days. This was before the advent of commercial Internet use, mind you...the fax machine was already taking a toll. Now, there are almost no bike messengers at all...electronic transactions, signatures, filing of information, email, etc. have all supplanted the need to move physical documents at high speed and high cost. Never mind the fact (as stated above, at length) that all those documents needed to be printed on paper, which in turn caused emissions, the paper made from wood pulp (again, more carbon), or the cutting down of the trees (more carbon, and some loss of carbon-absorbing plant life). Just think about the bicycle messengers, and even more importantly, the car messengers (of which there were just as many, they just don't stand out in traffic). And then, compare that to a posting on a web site, an electronic filing, or an email. Really?
Greenpeace, if you love the earth so much...why not actually act like you're FROM here? Jeez...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Greenpeace emits too much bullshit.
Who cares how green it is. I want it and I dont give a d*mn about greenery, except maybe the kind one can spend. Hopefully I will live to see the last Enviornmentalist strangled in the intestines of the last trial lawyer. a pox on people-hating greens.
Greenpeace is complaining that the Internet:
a) Allows people to research far more information than the limited amount they prefer to give to people, thus letting people be swayed by other, more -- or less! -- rational environmental groups;
b) Emits more hot air than they do.
But seriously folks: this claim that the IT industry uses "dirty energy" can be leveled at any industry in the modern world. That is to say, an industry that uses electricity. They take any industry in the US (which they do in the article) and then say, 'It uses enough energy to power country (x)!' (In the article's case, the UK.) For example:
"The health industry doesn't do enough to reduce its reliance on 'dirty energy'. If you took the entire US's health industry and pharmaceutical firms' energy use, it could power Spain!'
'The media industry doesn't do enough to reduce it's reliance on 'dirty energy'. If you took the entire US's newspapers, magazines, and television news' energy use, it could power South Korea!'
'The government industry doesn't do enough to reduce its reliance on 'dirty energy'. If you took the energy use by all levels of government in the US, it could power Italy!'
Repeat ad nauseum.
The real question is, 'Why does the industry matter?' The energy used by ALL industries in the nation will aggregate to... guess what, the types of energy the country has! The solution is move the whole country to use cleaner energy, which would necessarily mean that all industries in that country would be 'cleaner' in their energy use.
This is Greenpeace using the Apple Strawman scheme all over again.
In other news, Microsoft Windows users are now covered under the Americans with Disabilties Act...
STFU!
...that Greenpeace emits too much CO2. :-)
Did they subtract the amount of CO2 that doesn't get emitted because people are sending emails, planning better driving routes, shopping online and telecommuting?
Words, words, words
greanpeace produces too much garbage in their campaigns.
So until they find a way to run a absolute zero emission company I will regard them as spamers and civil engineers driven by corporate interests with their sole goal making people believe the lie that there really exists an organization, in this culture, that works for the well beeing of the environment.
-- no sig today