data centers - more harmful to the environment than airlines by tate cantrell

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 16 2009) Carbon Footprint , Emissions

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    It’s no secret that the airline industry has come under fire more than a few times in the last few years due to its notoriously negative impact on air pollution.  A simple Google search can reveal plenty of stats out there to support how much pollution airplanes put into the Earth’s atmosphere.  There is a great video currently being featured on Green Data Center News that actually maps out the world’s air traffic over a 24 hour period and shows just how astonishingly busy our skies are on a given day and the vast amount of gasoline it must take to fuel our friendly skies.   

   Even more astonishing is a recent report by Lex Coors in the Data Center Journal showing a concerning trend which has forecasted the growing data center population to overtake the airline industry in greenhouse emissions within the next five to ten years and to quadruple by 2020.  The airline industry is taking ambitious strides to curb its own carbon emissions with International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly by 2020 and reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050.  Airlines are also being affected by cap-and-trade legislation and may need to begin meeting those restrictions as early as 2012 in the European Union.  If the airline industry meets these goals and adapts to these restrictions, data centers may be in a pollution class of their own even sooner than expected. 

   What compounds the problem for data centers is the explosive expected growth over the next couple of years coinciding with the increased demand for IT services such as cloud computing and WAN-based virtualization mobility.  Companies that are running or planning data center projects might want to take a proactive approach similar to the airline industry in reducing carbon emissions now and ease the burden of big brother bullying them into it later on.  This may happen at the individual company level with IT managers and CIOs taking the initiative to implement green programs for their own data centers or the industry as a whole stepping up to set specific goals for the entire spectrum like the IATA has done for the airline industry.  As the data center industry has historically focused more on cutting costs than helping the environment, it will be interesting to see how many companies realize that these goals are quickly becoming one in the same.

   
   

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