Is IT green? It depends on your PR agency
Software, telecommunications and computers play an enormous role in greening up business, first and foremost by allowing us to monitor and track the performance of renewables and conservation efforts, and how we access and manage energy on the grid, within industry, and in homes and businesses. Such technologies specifically designed to be enablers of greener products or processes could, on their own, earn the label of being green. But is a more efficient computer (or appliance for that matter), or the use of IT to replace what is otherwise an energy-intensive task, also worthy of a green label? If you compare how we treat vehicles, the answer would appear yes. We label hybrid cars, electric cars, and small vehicles like the Smart Car green because of their reduced environmental footprint, so why shouldn’t we label a data centre green or an individual computer server technology green because of their dramatically reduced use of electricity?
My only problem with this is that cars, appliances, and computers naturally get efficient over time. An Energy Star appliance today could be deemed an energy hog 10 years from now. It’s a constantly moving target, so calling a computing product or car green is, I suppose, relative to some kind of industry average at a given point in time. Same goes for lighting — will CFLs be considered energy efficient when LEDs become mainstream? Perhaps it’s impossible to come up with a clear, objective definition of “green.” Green is in the eye of the beholder, a subjective label that might be obvious to some and considered greenwashing to others.
On Wednesday Cisco chief executive John Chambers will be joined by Al Gore on a “telepresence” system (a fancy videoconferencing system) that will be broadcast live at a trade show in Orlando, Florida. Chambers and Gore will argue in front of an audience that such technology is green because you can hold in-person meetings without having to travel by jet or train or automobile — in other words, without creating a carbon footprint. I suppose this is true, but videoconferencing no matter how fancy isn’t anything new. It was proposed as an ideal solution during the SARS infection outbreak in Toronto as a way to conduct business without catching diseases; it was proposed as a way to avoid being on a hi-jacked plane after Sept. 11; and it’s been proposed as a way to keep the world running if a bird flu pandemic strikes. It gets reinvented, recast depending on the crisis of the day. In fact, Chambers has been making the same argument lately for most things IT. So, is it green? If so, should we call the telephone, or e-mail, or the Internet green?
It’s not entirely clear to me where the line should be drawn. Perhaps the marketplace will be the ultimate judge, and the public either accepts the green talk of a company like Cisco or rejects it as greenwashing. It’s a risk any company faces when it tries to take something that exists and market it as green, for no other reason than because it can and nobody calls them on it.
For the record, I’m a big supporter of using any technology to improve efficiency and reduce the need to travel. In fact, it would be interesting to see a study that tries to estimate how much greenhouse gas emissions we have avoided by moving to a networked world. The question is whether we can properly call it green.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
March 19th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
everything is going to be calling itself green. so hopefully there will be standards and measurements and real transparency, so that people can make educated decisions… but really everyone is going to try to outgreen the jonses– have you been offered the services of a local toronto green bike courier service yet (how is that more green than your average bike courier)?
you’re totally right that green is subjective, and will evolve …Hopefully LEED will look mamby pamby in a few years… these are all moving targets. but isn’t it encouraging that we have even gotten to this point?
but i don’t agree with one thing Dear Sir— you said “cars, appliances, and computers naturally get efficient over time.” and computers might be like that, but it took an enormous amount of pressure to make refrigerators more efficient- and cars? i’d say when looking at the efficiency of a Model T and then the efficiency of any pre CAFE car, there was an unnatural effort to avoid efficiencies as best as possible
March 19th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
My previous employer started to put “green” categories into the yearly objectives. This company had a telecommuting program, allowing people to work from home occasionally (a lot of managers seemed threatened by the program, but that’s another story). Anyway, when I said that I was going to meet my “green” objective, in part, by working from home more often and reducing pollution by driving less, it was not received very well. This was one of the banks (the green one, ironically).
Telecommuting is such a powerful tool to solve some of our current congestion and smog problems. The government should be supporting it with tax credits and subsidies if they’re not already.
Regarding “shades of green”… I have a hard time calling any product “green”, really… I think “more efficient” is OK, but to say that any product is environmentally-friendly is kind of missing the point: the environmentally-friendly product is… no product. It’s environmentally-friendly to reduce consumption. Especially, there’s no such thing as an environmentally-friendly car, only a less environmentally-destructive car.
March 19th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Forgot one other thing… computers may get more efficient over time, but the efficiency gains are often done in order to increase capability and the efficiency gains are eaten up by faster processing speeds. The current line of Core 2 Duo CPUs from Intel, for example, may use up to 65W at their peak. This is a huge improvement over the preceding Pentium 4, but the original Pentium of 12 years ago used less than 1/4th of this amount of power.
But this is a general trend, I think… power efficiency gains are eaten up by the increased use that they make possible. Portable devices would not be possible without highly power-efficient electronics. Now that we have such electronics, all kinds of new power-consuming applications are possible that were not possible before. Efficiency just seems to pave the way for further growth.
March 20th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Yup. It’s like food. If it’s half the fat, people often think they can eat twice as much. If a bulb uses half the power, people leave it on twice as long – I’ll leave a 25watt CFL on for a hour, whereas the 150watt Incandescent right beside it gets flipped on for only a few seconds at a time due to its higher power consumption. But in the end my power bill’s energy usage stats are going up:(.
Increased efficiency always means increased consumption.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I think this suggestion makes a lot of sense:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/18/carbonemissions.news
March 20th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
“There is nothing you can buy with the saved energy that has more energy content per dollar than the energy you just saved” – Amory Lovins
Bounce back effects have little overall impact. Saturation points exist, so over-consumption is a moot point in energy efficiency.
Darklamp
March 22nd, 2008 at 4:01 pm
…. that’s simply not true.
March 24th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
What makes an energy source clean is how it was produced. A city like Santa Rosa, for instance trying to do its bit for the environment. Popular Science called it “Tapping Geysers for Watts,” and in an article described how 12 million gallons of wastewater the city pumps to the steam fields daily gets converted into 85 megawatts of power, enough to power 85,000 homes. When appliance and electric vehicles run on power generated in this way, there is no carbon footprint at all.
http://www.zapworld.com
March 27th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Of course of course. Now that I have an energy efficient refrigerator, I am going to buy four more and fill them with food. Or better yet. I am going to drive 30 kms to commute to work instead of 20 kms, just because my vehicle can do 50 mpg now.
Saturations exist!
Darklamp
April 8th, 2008 at 9:18 am
That’s a simplistic way of looking at it. $2500 cars from Tata, for example, that have incredible fuel efficiency create a whole new market for cars that never existed before. People that were once priced out of the market are now included as potential customers and fuel consumers.
And over half of the Western populations now carry cell phones in their pockets because electronics are so efficient that such an affordable portable device is possible, creating a demand for tens of millions of batteries that only last 3 years (and for phones that have a defacto lifespan of the same, or less). All of these phones are being charged and losing energy throughout the day, and they are charged with chargers that dissipate energy in their transformation of AC to DC. And this is obviously just one very small example.
I agree that, in absolute terms, saturation points do exist. But if that saturation point is 6 billion people driving 30km to work every day then I think we’ll kill the planet before we reach the saturation point.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Well said. I understand the idea of more products being pumped into the market might not look like a good thing. The point I am making though is on energy efficiency, not commerical nor business efficiency.
Tata Motors was able to take a vehicle and design it to be very cheap. Sure the engine can provide great mileage, but the innovation was reducing the cost of producing a car. This is much different than increasing the fuel efficiency of the entire existing GM fleet as an example.
Energy efficiency did not inspire the cell phone to become staple item in your pocket/purse. It was an increase in manufacturing efficiency of electronic componets that created an affordable market for cheap commuication devices.
I believe efficiencies exist everywhere, even nature experiments, with an adavatage of having millions of years of experience. Energy efficiency, though, is a reduction of energy consumption for the same service/output. So obviously, our Indian friends are increasing their energy consumption for the same service of getting from point A to B. By definition, this is not energy efficiency.
To reinforce my point, saturations of energy efficiency exist because: human preferences are complex, your saved fuel cannot drive you further than where you already want to be, your saved lighting cannot make a lit space brighter than it already is and so on.
Darklamp