The Internet Of Emissions

Victoria Turk sums up Greenpeace’s latest report (pdf) on the global environmental impact of the IT industry:

It puts IT-related emissions at two percent of global emissions—about the same as the aviation industry.

While it’s harder to envisage emissions coming from the hum of your laptop compared to, say, the roar of a jet engine, keeping data centres in power requires a lot of, well, power. And as our data consumption increases and more people get connected, that’s only going up. As Greenpeace writes, “The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the sector’s sustainability efforts.”

The report commended some companies for committing to clean energy—it praised Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce for setting goals of 100 percent renewable energy for their data centres and making steps in that direction. It was considerably less effusive in its verdict on [Amazon Web Services] (whose data centres provide storage and computing to a whole load of internet heavy-hitters) and Twitter[.]

Lauren C. Williams adds that this naming and shaming really does push IT companies to clean up their act:

“What you have is a set of customer-facing companies that are delivering very valuable information services,” Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University research fellow for energy policy and finance, told ThinkProgress. “Because they are customer-facing, these companies actually care about where they get their electricity. When it’s shown that they’re getting their energy from sources that aren’t as clean, that’s a problem for their customers.”

To combat a poor public image, companies in turn start revising their policies and focus on investing in cleaner energies. Greenpeace released a similar report in 2012 that named Apple as one of the dirtiest companies. Since then, Apple has jumped to the front of pack. “Apple is the archetypal example,” Koomey said. “They were really slammed in the first report. And what Apple decided to do was put this whole thing behind them and go to 100 percent renewable [energy].”