greenpeace shifts its sights to apple - by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Apr 25 2011)

1. 

   Earth Day came and went, and things carry on much as before, But the day saw a shift in the ongoing PR war over data center energy.

   Greenpeace’s report, How Dirty is your Data ranked ten leading cloud IT companies according to how “dirty” electricity supplies are - in effect, how carbon-intensive their operations are. And Apple was ranked as “dirtiest”. 

   For more than a year, Greenpeace has been engaged in a campaign against Facebook and its use of coal-fired electricity. It challenged it to move to clean electricity before Earth Day, and it wasn’t impressed by at the social giant’s Open Compute initiative, a great industry-leading, information-sharing initiative which was summed up on this blob by Doug Mohney: “Wow!” 

   That campaign tipped over into parody, when Greenpeace, which regularly puts Facebook down for being  gossipy and frivolous, organised a record-breaking stunt: getting the most comments on a single Facebook post  in 24 hours.

   The stunt succeeded: 84.551 smileys and “what he saids” got Greenpeace into the record books, and really got the message home to Facebook that the world’s lovable peaceniks are against pointless social networking that wastes energy. Or something.

   Greenpeace isn’t letting Facebook off the hook, though it has given it a small pat on the back for getting some solar panels, so it can generate about one percent of the electricity its Prinevill data center uses (enough for part of the office space).

   But Friday’s dirty data report took Greenpeace back to earlier roots of its IT-related campaigning. It’s argued before that devices like the iPad, by making it easier to consume cloud resources, will boost the amount of tech we use, and add needlessly to IT’s carbon footprint.

   Yahoo came off best in the report, with a coal intensity of only 13.8 percent, compared with Apple’s 54 percent. The Greenpeace study looked into the data centers of ten companies altogether - the full roster is Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Akamai and Amazon.

   I think there are three interesting side issues thrown up by the report.

   Firstly, in standing against coal, Greenpeace is opposing a major and continuing direction in energy generation. The IEA has a graph of world energy generation (thank you Timothy Prickett-Morgan) which shows that coal power and gas power are continuing to increase, while oil fades out a bit, and nuclear has a steady, continuing - and essential - chunk of energy supply.

   Meanwhile, the only significant renewable source at the moment is hydro power. Solar and wind are growing but are still infinitesimal by comparison with the giant sources.

   Secondly, by opposing cloud, Greenpeace is up against another apparently inevitable movement. Increasing use of cloud looks to me like a trend as inevitable as the increased use of cars in the last century. In retrospect, those cars are an unbelievably stupid environmental move, but could anyone have stood against them?

   I don’t believe cloud is as bad as cars, but it’s probably as unstoppable.

   Thirdly, though, there is openness.  Greenpeace’s report card marks each cloud company on transparency, and it puts that mark first, because information is the first important thing to get here. Unfortunately, these companies really aren’t giving much away, so a lot of the information in the report is guesswork.

   The entry for Twitter’s coal intensity is less than Apple’s, but the company gets straight Fs on its report card, largely because it simply won’t tell Greenpeace, or others, what its energy use is and what its greenhouse emissions are.

   All of which brings us back to Facebook. Greenpeace is critical of Facebook for not sharing its greenhouse gas emissions or details of its facilities’ energy use. Overall, it gets a D for transparency, but Greenpeace does give it praise for that Open Compute project we mentioned before. 

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