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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.
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.
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.
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
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"?
"...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.
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
They can shut down their servers and help make the internet a bit greener.
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.
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"
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
-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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'
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...