By Richard Romano on May 14th, 2012 WhatTheyThink’s Going Green
has joined forces with Two Sides to help address the
“perceptions” that paper destroys forests, that electronic media
are “greener” than print and paper, and that recycling is the
solution to all environmental ills. According to a study by
Jonathan Koomey at Stanford University, “Electricity used in
global data centers in 2010 likely accounted for between 1.1%
and 1.5% of total electricity use. For the US that number was
between 1.7% and 2.2%.” Why should you care? Now, admittedly,
that doesn’t sound like an awful lot, but electricity generation
inevitably comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which have a
whole host of environmental impacts at nearly every stage of the
process, from extraction, to production, to consumption. And
it’s a safe bet that more of our lives will be spent online and
in social media (or via apps, one “hint” of what could be a
post-Google Internet), which means even more demand for data
center capacity—and ergo more ele