If IT Steps up to the carbon challenge who pays? - By Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Dec 18 2009)

1. 

    The UN's climate change summit in Copenhagen last week faced one big
   question - who pays for reducing emissions? The developing or the developed world? The US or China? To my surprise, the Green IT movement faces more or less the same question. Who pays?
   
    The issue of payment is a surprise in Green IT. Normally we hear that
   making IT sustainable is a benefit, not a cost. Reducing energy use reduces
    energy bills.

    In the last year, the whole IT industry, more or less, has converged on a
   single message around efficiency. Energy costs money, and new IT kit
    generally uses less energy than old IT kit, so buy lots of our new boxes
    http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/dell-unleashes-cooler--cheaper-servers--473.  You'll save money, and save the planet. It's an oversimplified message, clearly tailored for a recession, and it misses two obvious questions. Firstly you must take the energy use of the whole lifecycle of equipment into account, including manufacture and disposal.  And secondly, new boxes reduce energy mostly by consolidation - running fewer servers. And I don't personally believe that Intel or Dell are basing their business plans on selling fewer servers in future.
   
   So we have the next Green IT pitch, which is more of a turf war
   http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/knowledge/can-it-win-the-green-turf-wars--605 . IT consumes two  percent of the world's energy and it makes two percent of its greenhouse gases, which makes it of the same order as aviation, and any reduction to that contribution is good. But, the argument goes, IT could take a much larger role; by applying smarts, it could reduce the outputs of  the other 98 percent of the world's activity. The argument has come into focus through the year, but the IDC conference at Copenhagen
   http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/it-could-meet-g20-carbon-targets--says-analyst-2639 pushed it into the spotlight, promising that IT could save 5.8 billion tonnnes of CO2 - basically going a long way to meeting the world's emissions targets single-handed.

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