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Cyber warming: PCs produce same CO2 emissions as airlines
Marie Woolf and Geoffrey Lean, Independent
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.
Meanwhile, the Health Protection Agency is to start measuring levels of radiation from Wi-Fi systems in response to mounting concerns.
The two initiatives will mark the biggest official attempt to address some of the environmental consequences of the extraordinarily rapid spread of IT into almost every aspect of daily life. Up to eight million new computers are sold in Britain every year, along with 1.8 million Wi-Fi terminals in the past 18 months.
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.
(10 June 2007)
Carbon is the new Black
Steve Burrell, Sydney Morning Herald
An emissions trading scheme will bring a bonanza for many – with this year’s election determining who the winners might be.
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WHERE there’s muck, there’s brass. The climate change debate in Australia has been all about the politics of pain, focused on the cost to the economy, business and consumers and the risk of a “greenhouse recession” if government mishandles the fix to the problem.
But while there will certainly be costs for companies and consumers, many businesses will be making lots of money in the new low-carb world.
With both sides of politics now committed to introducing carbon trading, and a price on carbon emissions, the investment outlook in many key industries has been transformed.
Some sectors could struggle, while others will flourish. Whole new industries will emerge, based on the suddenly viable alternative technologies that will spring up in response to the new demands to reduce CO2 emissions. New financial markets will be created to make the system work.
Welcome to the Carbon Rush of the 21st Century, a potential bonanza that, globally, could make the 19th century gold rushes look small by comparison.
(9 June 2007)
Is carbon offsetting the solution? (Or part of the problem?)
Mark Honigsbaum, The Observer
…Leafing through Kenyan Airways’s in-flight magazine I read that Africa’s rainforests are vanishing faster than any others on earth. During the Eighties the continent lost 10 per cent of its green canopy. Since the Nineties, this process has accelerated, with 5m hectares of forest – an area equivalent to Togo – being destroyed every year.
The causes are many and varied: logging for hardwood, planting for sugar cane, illegal land seizures by farmers and cattle ranchers, or simply encroachment by ordinary Africans desperate for firewood for their stoves.
Whatever the cause, it is a vicious cycle. The more trees are cut down, the quicker soils erode and the faster streams and rivers dry up. The result is drought or, when the rains come, catastrophic floods, prompting refugees to flee to more fertile, food-secure areas where they pile further pressure on the land. But what if there were a way of interrupting this cycle, of guaranteeing not only the survival of Africa’s remaining rainforests but of regenerating those areas which have already been stripped of timber?
Moreover, what if instead of the burden for this replanting falling on Africans the costs could be borne by corporations or international travel addicts – people like you and me – through a system of carbon offsetting? Wouldn’t that be a win-win solution for everyone?
That is what I have come to Uganda to find out.
…To its critics, offsetting is no more than a clever accounting trick, a seductive and possibly counter-productive ruse to convince consumers they can get something for nothing. Far from deciding to insulate their lofts, invest in low-energy light bulbs and switch to bio-fuels, most consumers will simply continue their same old polluting ways, thinking they’ve done their bit for the environment. In other words, as Kevin Smith argues in his book The Carbon Myth, offsetting is capitalism’s version of medieval ‘indulgences’ – a convenient way of assuaging the north’s guilt while Rome, or in this case Africa, continues to burn.
Then there is the issue of how you calculate the carbon sequestered in a particular area of forest and put a value on the resulting ‘credit’. Before I began researching this article I had no idea, as I am sure most British consumers don’t, that when you click on a carbon calculator looking to offset the emissions of your recent shopping trip to New York, what you’re actually buying is a guarantee that those trees will not only be planted but will survive for 100 years – the period required to absorb your emissions and thus render your flight ‘carbon neutral’.
Not only that, but the voluntary market in carbon offsets is self-regulating, meaning it’s potentially open to abuse. Little wonder then that radical ecologists dismiss carbon offsetting as ‘Enron environmentalism’ and label many of the companies who market offset and renewable-energy products as ‘carbon spivs’.
…Having flown more than 4,000 miles and wasted God knows how much petrol motoring through the rainforest I’m not so sure. I love trees, but the case for forest offsets still strikes me as insubstantial and, ultimately, as ungraspable as air.
(10 June 2007)
