YOU are the worlds biggest producer of CO2

Question: What is the single fastest growing cause of CO2 in the world? Apparently despite being the focus of many an environmental news story it's not aviation. Nor is it the humble motor car. Nope, not even all those SUV's or Porsches.

No it is in fact The Internet. Hardly surprising if you think about it. All those millions of personal computers drawing power from the electricity grid which gains the majority of it's energy from burning fossil fuels in power stations. Then there are the data centres, with their huge energy requirements not only to power their servers but to keep them cool (which requires about the same amount of energy as just keeping them turned on). Add to this the communications networks that hook them all together and you can see how it all adds up.

So what can we do? Well until true Green IT takes hold, which in my experience will require a massive change in the way IT, Facilities and Finance teams work together in most organisations to gain a meaningful foothold, all we can do as individuals is to apply similar principles as we do to other environmentally damaging areas such as driving.

1) Drive a more economical vehicle. In this case if you still have a clattery old desktop or tower PC the chances are it's drawing more power than it needs to. It's the computing equivalent of driving a Hummer to work. Replace it with a sleek efficient laptop.

2) Reduce your usage. If you use webmail services such as GMail with their massive storage limits you may have forgotten what it's like to have to delete spam, junk and stuff that you just plain don't need any more. It's a good habit to get back into though, if we all reduce our storage on our webmail providers servers it will slow the rate of growth of their data centres and therefore the rate of increase in their carbon footprints. Don't forget to unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters to stop it building up so quickly too.

It's not much but it's a start. Maybe enough of you can delete enough e-mails to offset the carbon footprint of this blog?

UK Energy Saving Day Fails

Apparently 27th/28th February 2008 was the UK's first "E-Day" energy saving day in which UK residents were encouraged to turn off unwanted electrical appliances for 24 hours.

Unfortunately the organisers forgot to tell anyone about the day with the net result being a slight increase in the amount of electricity drawn from the national grid (due to colder than usual weather).

To be honest even we at Earth Dream have only just found out about the day after the event - not that it would have made much difference, we turn off our lights and TV's already ;) - which just goes to show quite how badly publicised it was. Which is a shame as obviously quite a bit of effort has gone into the website at e-day.org.uk and it wouldn't have been much of a leap to convert some of that effort into some actual proactive PR (and no, Facebook pages don't count) so that people at least had a chance to take part in the event.

Hopefully they've learned their lessons and will make a proper fist of it next year.

The Catch 22 of the Green Agenda

Let's get one thing straight, we need energy. How we provide this energy is anything but straight though. The world has pretty much agreed that oil isn't a long term solution, not least because we'll have burned it all. So we'll burn all the coal until that is gone, and suffer the political turmoil of supplying natural gas until we can no longer rely on that.

So what does that leave us? We need to either reduce our energy consumption or get new types of power"station" hooked up to the grid which broadly speaking means renewables or nuclear.

Let's deal with the former first. Yes we should be ensuring that our energy consumption is as low as possible but civilisation simply doesn't want to regress so even with more efficient technology the imminent rise of the electric car, huge new markets for everything from industrial machinery to consumer gadgets opening up in developing countries and countless other factors putting demand on the global electricity supply in general terms the amount of electricity required to power the planet particularly post-oil is unlikely to fall.

Nuclear is some sort of energy supply bogeyman after a couple of high profile disasters so let's put that aside for a minute.

So we invest in renewables right? Well yes we do but will solar and wind farms really be able to reliably deliver the global electricity demand? In the future perhaps but short term we need to improve the technology which requires R&D and manufacturing which requires...energy. So let's be ideal-amentalist for a minute and assume that we are adopting a 100% renewables agenda - we find ourselves racing against time to produce a viable renewable solution before we are hindered by lack of availability of existing energy supplies with which to perform the development work.

Biofuels have a nice easy-marketing ring about them until you consider the amount of land that would need to be given over to growing crops for fuel and the resulting deforestation.

So this brings us back to nuclear. Negative pr caused by a couple of disasters has pretty much made nuclear an unviable proposition for political reasons and previously the high cost relative to coal and oil has made it non-viable for economic reasons despite it being the cleanest technology capable of providing for our power hungry planet.

"But what about the radioactive waste" - well I'm a firm believer that if the world hadn't given up on Nuclear post-Chernobyl then the rate of progress and investment in the technology would have found a solution for that by now. Even if it was sending the waste into space on electric rockets.

It's not ideal but for the short term we've got to accept that there is no "Green" way to provide the energy we need so however unpalatable we can only find the least bad solution.