how green can IT be?

buy this product, save the planet!

Companies wishing to greenwash their brand, can enroll in carbon footprint benchmarking programs to "produce carbon labels".

We should all become carbon neutral:

To be considered carbon neutral, an organization must reduce its carbon footprint to zero. Determining what to include in the carbon footprint depends upon the organization and the standards they are following.
Generally, Direct emissions sources must be reduced and offset completely, while indirect emissions from purchased electricity can be reduced with renewable energy purchases.

The Carbon Neutral Company, a big player in the carbon offset market, features a carbon calculator that easily tells you how much offset credits you need to buy. At the Carbon Neutral Company. The calculation is largely bogus, since it only considers headcount and business travel. For an IT firm like ours, emissions are mainly determined by the amount of servers running 24/7.

the carbon neutral myth

Offsetting your carbon emissions is a flawed concept anyway. Of course it's good if you plant a tree somewhere. But that doesn't stop the carbon you're emitting yourself from reaching the atmosphere. To really, really stop hurting the planet, we'll have to really, really, stop emitting CO2 altogether.

The idea of planting trees in order to "neutralise" emissions taps into a pre-existing cultural notion that something with obvious environmental benefits could be used to cancel out doing something environmentally damaging.

But it just doesn't add up.

CO2 is absorbed by trees as part of the carbon cycle, an incredibly complicated set of chemical, physical, geological, and biological processes passing carbon through the earth's biosphere. The carbon cycle can be divided into two parts: active and inert. Trees are part of the active carbon cycle, a continual movement of carbon among plants, organisms, water and the atmosphere. In contrast, reserves of fossil fuels are inert: the carbon they contain is locked up and does not come into contact with the active part of the carbon cycle unless we burn them.

Movement of carbon between the active cycle and the inert pool is one-way - once carbon is released from the inert pool by burning fossil fuels, it enters the active cycle. It will not return to the inert pool unless it undergoes the same sort of millennia-long geological process that transformed it into a fossil fuel in the first place. Kevin Smith - The Carbon Neutral myth

If Green IT is to be more than window-dressing and marketese, IT companies will have to drastically rethink their energy sourcing mix. Basing operations on renewables like water, wind and solar power may be the only sustainable option. Google and Microsoft are already basing their datacenter strategy on water power. Peak oil helps, of course....