Green IT Initiatives Possible Waste of Time
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: greent, IT, carbon, footprint
Professor Richard Hawkins of the Calgary University in Alberta, Canada is a prominent figure in tech-policy and is currently driving a movement to show that the majority of 'green IT' initiatives are not working and a different course of action needed.
Quoting Professor Hawkins of Calgary University :
“Most of the negative environmental impacts [of IT] occur in the form of completely unintended, second and third order effects. These ‘rebound’ effects may not be mitigated by inventing ‘greener’ IT products and, indeed, may be intensified by such changes.”
One example that Hawkins presents is mobile phones, claiming that the phone itself has no environmental impacts, but its sole existence encourages people to move around more - by car, plane, boat, etc – than they normally would have without the mobile device which ultimately contributes to carbon emissions and climate change.
“We didn’t adopt the mobile phone so we could drive and talk on the phone, we adopted it because we were already driving so much. Creating a greener cell phone won’t reduce the impact of increased mobility. The real question is what amount of mobility is sustainable?”
That example also, without question, does apply to other technologies such as mobile push email, VoIP, video conferencing, netbooks, the list goes on. Essentially, if you did not have the ability to be ‘mobile’ then you would spend more time sitting in the office being productive and burning less fuel, for example.
Hawkins concerns are not being taken lightly either as he and his team of researchers will be presenting their thoughts at a Euro comms-policy conference in Spain next month as well as to the UN Earth Summit at the end of this year.
More information about Hawkins and his research may be found here.
How do you personally feel about green-IT? For example, efficient power supplies, or power saving motherboards? Do you feel that these are useful? Or do you feel that because of the way you use your rig, power saving features end up being useless?
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I prefer efficiency versus power saving
This guy doesn't see the whole picture. Granted some of what he says is true but making IT green inset a waste of time. When you make computer Hardware green it consumes less energy which saves energy. Thats less coal and emissions we burn and less money we spend. Thats a good thing in my book
Unless we implement more Nuclear power, then there is even less "green house gases".... the only reason coal is such a significant power source in the USA is because of the environmentalists of the 70's which if you ask me, set the USA back and not forward, even Europe is wise to the wonders of nuclear.
[citation][nom]Efrayim[/nom]This guy doesn't see the whole picture.[citation]
Seeing tertiary and quaternary effects and beyond isn't seeing the big picture?
The fact of the matter is, if we invented holographic video conferencing, we'd save huge amounts of energy, and drop carbon emissions by large amounts.
So his solution is to make cellular phones that are sufficiently crappy to make you not want to go anywhere?
Seriously, if you want to reduce pollution and emissions, enforce trade restrictions on China until they come up with some type of respectable environmental laws. The amount of pollution we could save over there would dwarf anything we could do in America or Europe. If you only care about your local environment, then you're not a true environmentalist.
I prefer efficiency versus power saving
Agreed.
I think they should really research global warming instead of blaming CO2. I don't think CO2 causes it for a very simple reason. What happens when you shake a can of CO2? It gets cold. When CO2 compresses it gets colder so its really just reactive to the temperature around it.
On green technology I think its great in terms of effeciency. With higher wattage devices you run into issues with heat and cost to operate. However, I still prefer 125w effecient processing over 1w terrible processing power.
Falchard, you really don't understand what you're talking about.
How do you personally feel about green-IT? For example, efficient power supplies, or power saving motherboards? Do you feel that these are useful? Or do you feel that because of the way you use your rig, power saving features end up being useless?
At home my pc's currently underclocked to 166x6 (e6600) and graphics to 500/450 (4870) because I have trouble with raid after every coldboot. But in general I don't care much about power efficiency in my home pc. At work it's a bit different though. I would love if we had efficient power supplies and energy saving motherboards. But we don't!
Most of the computers on the site where I am right now are more than 5 years old. They're old Socket A athlon XP's from 1700 to 2800, or northwoods's up to 2.4ghz. I would guess there are about a hundred of those pc's in use here. I have no idea how much power we could save by replacing all those systems with more efficient ones (amd's 'e' marked processors on 780g platforms, or pentium dual cores on something with eist and c1e support). The simple problem however is, that no matter how much we could potentially save, we would have to start by making a considerable investment to get there. And you try telling a boss that has her budget cut every 5 seconds, that she needs 100 new pc's to save on power....
THAT is where the problem is. And I think it's the same in most industries. Who'd want to replace their old durable merc van with a new sprinter just because it drives a bit futher on the same gas? (not sure what vans u use in the state? do you even have vans?)
What piss-poor logic. If it indirectly leads to power use in some other manner, therefore it's not "green"? Well, exercise is bad for you because it leads to harder breathing, at a higher rate which introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere. BAN EXERCISE FOREVER
What piss-poor logic. If it indirectly leads to power use in some other manner, therefore it's not "green"? Well, exercise is bad for you because it leads to harder breathing, at a higher rate which introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere. BAN EXERCISE FOREVER
I believe Al Gore is writing a law now to stop people from breathing altogether, lest we destroy the environment. Of course he will be excluded though.
Does this idiot Hawkins even realize what he is saying?
"“We didn’t adopt the mobile phone so we could drive and talk on the phone, we adopted it because we were already driving so much. Creating a greener cell phone won’t reduce the impact of increased mobility. The real question is what amount of mobility is sustainable?”
He wants to reduce mobility? The whole idea of freedom and liberty is the idea of mobility. If you don't like your city, county, state, etc... you move. Mobility is freedom. The only way to for sure reduce mobility is to use government to restrict our movement and that my friends is tyranny.
In a free society people will alwyas move towards more and more mobility. Linking the fraud of global warming to mobility and thus freedom is just another way to control people and strip them of their freedom, liberty, and property. If I recall there was a guy who felt the same way as Hawkins and built a wall to reduce people's mobility his name was Stalin.
So according to this professor your GPS will be the end of the world. The ironic thing is I hear people say that technology makes us MORE isolated and sedimentary.
Anyway he's arguing that tech that allows us to do work while being mobile is causing us to (in the example given) out driving talking on the phone, doing business while shopping. Think your unimaginative hollywood business woman sterotype.
Anyway his argument is bunk. For every suit doing business from their car is someone staying home doing business there not buring fossil fuels to go to work.
if(Mobility != Waste)
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I was thinking pretty much what tenor said.
The sales people going on business trips, and reps hit trade shows etc. with their mobile gagetry still went on business trips and to trade shows prior to having said gagetry.
What advances in technology HAVE done is allowed more people to accomplish more work from home without having to go to the office. This "expert" has it backwards from what I've seen and experienced.
Except for businesses that have used "mobile" products to force their employees to work more hours. Example:
a. Employee works 8-5 at the office with an hour long lunch.
b. Employee, during his drive to/from home, is called due to emergencies at the office.
c1. Employee, not paying as much attention to driving, wrecks car. (Extra resources used.)
c2. Employee, forced to work late, doesn't have time to cook dinner at home versus "going out." (Driving cost; the employee's environmental cost of the restaurant's lights, etc.)
c3. Employee, working at home after normal 40 hours due to an emergency, uses extra resources due to working more than standard work week. (Power at home, work = less relaxation = unwise purchasing = more resources)
I agree with the majority of you that state that the devices themselves are not responsible for the waste. (Smaller, more efficient) But, I agree with Hawkins' point.
But the change in people's lifestyles due to the technology causes more waste.
And, this doesn't even get into the fact that some older technology (rotary phones, "well taken care of" older vehicles, etc.) last for decades. (Compared to today's common "use for 3 years and buy new.")
Combine today's energy efficiency advances with a change in the "work/life culture" of the typical American, and you would have the sweet spot for "overall green."
I think they're missing the point. I don't consider a cell phone a green IT product. The cell phone wasn't invented to save the environment and it wasn't adopted into common use because of it saved power. It was mostly used to replace CB radio and small band radio that companies used to communicate with employees field. I did construction one summer when I was in high school. We used CB radios to communicate with the office, order cement all the things we needed to get the job done. The draw back was that it wasn't private. It was hard to get a clear channel and you couldn't know your conversation was private.
I think of a ROHS compliant piece of hardware as green in so far as it doesn't have poison in it. When it's thrown away it doesn't leak poison into the groundwater. It's not required in the USA but most of the hardware is ROHS compliant these days. Although some would argue that lead free solder shortens the lifespan of electronics. Who really wants to keep a cell phone for 10+ years. We'd all be carrying 7lb analog briefcase phones still.
A quad core I7 with hyper threading could replace my whole server rack. It would use about 300W instead of the 1200W all those old servers use. That is Green. Green IT is all about saving money for the company and following good environmental practices during manufacture.
Unless we implement more Nuclear power, then there is even less "green house gases"
The whole world needs to go Nuclear, Coal plants are killing the earth.
Yes, the "green" craze is a waste of time.
- a bunch of theories pushed by self interest groups.
- everything should be designed for more efficiency.
- no one knows the capacity for population/consumption/heating/cooling
- Al Gore is a charlatan toxic Bore
Green is getting a bit boring now - time for a new craze/religion/gravey train.
What's it going to be in 2020 - saving some insect species becoming extinct on Mars?
i barely drive my car cause i walk to work, not cause i own a cell phone, the context that these guy's are taking is a bit off, gasoline cars is a separate issue that has nothing to do with the green IT movement. If a phone use's less energy then it has less of a footprint cause it's requiring less coal to be burned to charge it less often yet doing the same thing.
People also try to draw a link to things like computers, again, completely separate issue then cars.
You want to make the world a better place, force auto maker's to bring full electric cars to market with a universal hot swap battery option at every gas stations. In 5 years there would be no more smog.