Carbon Pharisees Or Carbon Sinners? Let’s Be Neither - by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jul 5 2010)

Categories:
Data Center Design: Construction, Container, Data Center Outages, Monitoring, Power and Cooling
Policy: Cap and Trade, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Reduction Commitment, Carbon Tax, Emissions
Power: Biomass, Fossil Fuel, Geothermal, Hydro, Nuclear, Solar, Wind
Application: Cloud Computing, Grid Computing
Technology: Microblogging, Networking, Servers, Storage, Supercomputer

Entities Mentioned


  1. Carbon Pharisees Or Carbon Sinners? Let’s Be Neither - by Peter Judge

    I’ve just heard the best presentation ever on carbon trading. At one blow, it laid out the bizarre and often stupid complexities of the rules... and the stark simplicity of the underlying need for them.


    The talk was given at the “Green Enterprise World Forum” in London, but it was all about Britain’s cap-and-trade laws, the CRC regulations. I’ve mentioned them before, and - like similar laws elsewhere - they will require the country’s biggest users of power to register, and report what they are using.


    Over the next few years, the impact gets steadily bigger, and eventually companies will be buying and trading credits to use gas and electricity - as well as the money they pay their utility provider.


    There are massive loopholes in the system, according to the presenter I heard, Andrew Jones, a consultant at ITM Communications. Big companies have to make five percent year-on-year cuts in their carbon footprint - but since it doesn’t take into account services they buy, there’s an easy way to do this. Outsource your energy, a piece at a time.


    It’s only your own electricity bill that counts, so if you have something done for you by someone else, it comes off your carbon account. If you send your staff home to work (and they pay for their own heating) you cut your carbon.


    And if you really want to game the system, you can juggle the figures so you don’t actually make any savings in the first few years, when the penalties are small, and make them all in the fourth year, when the benefits are greatest.


    As I’ve said before, complex laws can change our behaviour. But - as St Paul might have put it - laws can’t save us. They make it all a complicated game. Carbon Pharisees can boast of their purity, and score points without making any real changes, while others will just carry on as carbon sinners - for as long as they can get away with it.


    We aren’t going to all become holy overnight, and spontaneously reduce our energy use, so society has to use these laws - and hopefully design the game well enough so that playing it has some net benefit to the world.


    Because, as I heard, there’s a rather simple fact underlying the need for carbon reduction.


    There are arguments against man-made global warming. Tedious and blatantly dishonest, but they are arguments. But we have a more pressing need for carbon reduction, at least in my country.


    We simply don’t have enough generating capacity to meet our future needs.


    We could use more renewables, and we could use nuclear power - although this is unpopular with many people. But if energy needs keep growing , we won’t have enough electricity.  Your country may vary, but even if you have the option to build new generators, you can bet that not building those generators would free up money that could be better used elsewhere.


    What has all this to do with data centres? Well, this. IT and communications is on track to become one of the major carbon emitters of the world. It’s on a par with air travel, and growing. “It’s a drop-out from the Kyoto protocol”, according to Catalina McGregor, a firebrand who liaises between the European Commission and the United Nations on carbon emissions.


    At the same time, every scheme to reduce emissions and increase efficiency relies at some point on technology, said McGregor in her talk at the conference.  That might be IP-enabled smart meters, or video conferencing instead of air travel, but all those things are driving what is still an exponential growth in the energy use of IT and communications. 


    It seems we can’t reduce our total energy use without increasing the energy used by our ICT..


    Which is why it is so fundamental that tech energy is cut, whether that is the power burnt in old-fashioned data centres, the manufacturing energy cost of wasteful new kit, or the stand-by power of PCs left on overnight.


    So let’s not be carbon Pharisees or carbon sinners. Let’s cut energy, because there’s going to be less around, and because - simply put - it’s our job. 


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