Cyber warming: PCs produce same CO2 emissions as airlines

[jpak]

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2640428.ece

Ministers will this week embark on a campaign to curb "cyber-warming" from computers and information technology equipment that now does as much damage to the climate as aircraft emissions.

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A government-backed task force is to launch an attempt to reduce what it calls the "cyber carbon footprint" - which threatens to wreck attempts to hit targets for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming - and to encourage the spread of "green" technology.

New research shows that computers generate an estimated 35 million tons of the gas each year - the equivalent of one million typical flights to and from the UK. And Gartner, the international information technology research company, estimates that globally the IT industry accounts for around 2 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions - much the same as aviation.

It takes around 1.8 tons of chemicals, fossil fuels and water to produce a PC, and its operation generates 0.1 tons of CO2 in a typical year. They last, on average for three years and, once junked, most are buried in landfill. The soil where they are buried can become polluted with cadmium and mercury.

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[Deja Q]

1. I look for efficient, high quality components for my systems...

But I home-build.

When people buy fully assembled Apple, Dell, Lenovo, Gateway, or other branded PCs, do they know what's going into theirs? Or what corners have been cut so theirs can be bought as inexpensively as possible?

[Fredda Weinberg]

2. No matter the quality, the impact remains

Like nuclear power, we're using technology without planning for the residue. I recycle components whenever possible.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Unlike transportation, the *relative* impact of PC's is constantly shrinking...

in terms of the amount of energy consumed and pollution produced to do a given amount of work. With CRT's being replaced by flat monitors, and flash RAM replacing so many other types of removable media, I suspect the environmental impact of PC's is past its peak, and declining.

Something about this article smells like a red herring to me.

[skids]

4. Wouldn't count on it.

Energy efficiency is the furthest thing from the minds of most IT managers, and most home system consumers.

In both cases the "amount of work" being done by the units is not increasing, with the exception of those units running things like folding@home. The machines spend most of their time idle, as they are overpowered for their tasks.

Software bloat is partially to blame as it keeps taking more and more complicated and demanding software to do the same thing you did 5 years ago. While those of us in-the-know may find it humorous to ridicule very powerful modern systems brought to their knees by virus scanners and "utilities" installed by the manufacturer, the energy side of the equation is no joking matter.

On the server side we have virtualization to look forward to, but until then the number of servers to do the same
things keeps growing and growing as the OSes get less and less efficient and services have to be given their own boxes to run on to reduce the chances of other services interfering with them. Not to mention many commercial applications demand very specific OSes and versions to run on or they will not be supported -- so you need your RHEL3 boxes, RHEL4 boxes, RHEL5 boxes, SUSE boxes, and various flavors of Windows boxes, usually many of those for the same job simultaneuously.

We could hope that EnergyStar power initiatives will bring down the power used by idle systems, but it is not always the case that systems ship with the power savings settings optimized. In business environments it actually takes effort to get the most out of power savings technology -- configuring all the systems to suspend to disk and configuring the network for wake-on-lan functionality to get system patches to the machines even though they are suspended. Not many places have actually done so. I'm hoping we can get it to become policy sometime in the next year where I work.

So I advise anyone who is not a computer pro that wants an easy fix to buy laptops instead of desktops -- there you know the hardware is low-energy optimized, and things will usually come configured for power savings at least in battery mode -- all you have to do is click a few buttons to make it behave like it is on battery all the time.