Deep green IT

A great piece from Jerry Fishenden today on the deeper challenges of greening IT. Here's the opening:

The focus on the IT industry's impact on the environment and the Green Computing initiative being promoted by Computing and others are welcome developments. But we need to be careful that we don't fall into a simplistic trap here - and merely equate lower energy devices as being a total solution to the problem.

We need to be both far more realistic and far more ambitious. We need to analyse and understand the full extent of the technology industry's environmental impact. Everything from the production, packaging, and transportation of software on DVDs and CDs to the way we function as organisations, including our own commuting and travel patterns.

On the more positive side we need to articulate far more clearly the benefits to be derived from the smarter use of technology - including the potential to fundamentally transform the way our societies function.

Great stuff—I enthusiastically recommend clicking through to the full article.

Of course, another way IT could help us live a greener life is to make it easy to leverage community knowledge of the rich identity of stuff we buy—for example, the impact on the environment of its production, or how far it has travelled to get onto our plate. No-one has time to research this for themselves, or even read details that are provided, for every purchasing decision: but with effective community-powered, rich-information search tools we could make ethical decision making as easy and fun as falling off a log.

[UPDATE: Nicholas Carr reckons that "avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians"!]

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