Being green in a digital age
Posted by: Iain Closs on: February 20, 2010
This is the digital age, it’s the age of the internet and whether we like it or not, social networking plays a huge part in our work and everyday life, for me there is a small element of work but it mainly keeps me in touch with the people I love and friends I never want to lose contact with. There is many options out there for this but the one used by many is Facebook, I have Twitter Buzz and a few others but I mainly use Facebook because so many other do.
My relationship with Facebook has never been easy, sometimes their privacy terms are a little flaky and their claim use my photographs for their own needs had me considering if i should remove them but in the end i stuck with Facebook, and to be fair they improved in these aspects.
However the news that they are getting a dedicated data centre in Oregon which will mostly run on electricity from a coal powered power station has me thinking again.
I have always considered myself a green person, at a younger age my actions for the environment involved protest and fighting for what I believed in, these days I just do things more quietly, I still live close to the city not to need a car and in the house I am the recycling Nazi, I find that reducing my carbon footprint and living a normal life is pretty simple and each week I try to improve it one way.
But what happens when something that already is increasing your carbon footprint (computers are not green) gets much worse, is it time to stand up to your convictions and drop the offender? The answer for me may have to be yes because Facebook is knowingly moving to a polluting alternative. The reason for Oregon is because it has the right environment for an air-cooled data centre, however if they go through with their energy supplier then it will no longer be the right environment for my social networking.
However before that happens I’m letting my voice be heard and hoping that this can be avoided, there is other options for the company, they can still move their data centre Oregon and use another less polluting source, the area has a good few alternatives other than coal which im sure there CEO Mark Zuckerberg is aware of.
extra reading:
Search Data Centers.org
Change.org
Petition:
Iain Closs
Rebecca A. Watson
