Everything's Gone Green
Ian Jones, NCC Head of Publishing & Content, investigates the effects of the global green campaign on the technology industry...
After years of intellectual wrangling, there appears to be broad scientific consensus that we need to drastically reduce carbon emissions by the middle of the 21st century if we want to stabilise world temperatures.
If no action is taken, it has been warned that the concentration of greenhouse gases could reach double pre-industrial levels as early as 2035, virtually condemning us to a global average temperature increase of over 2C, devastating crops and causing increasingly extreme weather patterns.
In the longer term, there would be a more than 50% chance the temperature rise would exceed 5C, equivalent to the change in average temperatures from the last ice age to today. Why this is happening might still be up for debate, but the fact that it now represents a very real challenge is undeniable.
Ultimately, stabilisation – at whatever level – requires that annual emissions be brought down to more than 80% below current levels, according to the UK Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.
Tech race
For our collective part, the technology industries are responding and green is now very firmly the new currency of choice. Hi-tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic are scrambling over themselves to develop greener technologies that are more energy efficient and deliver more than just the feel-good effect of reducing carbon emissions.
PC makers HP and Dell, chip manufacturers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, as well as Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Oracle – to name but a few – have all joined consortia to improve energy efficiency.
This new greening of technology probably owes as much to the colour of money as it does about saving the planet – you don’t make money by selling less. At the corporate level, the cost of running data centres has soared because of the ever-rising global cost of electricity with energy consumption by servers and data centres doubling in the past five years and expected to almost double again in the next five years.
As referenced from the NCC’s most recent Green Survey (July 2008) energy cost-savings remain the key driver for respondents at 67%, but the reputational value of being seen to be green also a key driver for 58% of technology firms.
All of the recent surveys suggest the majority of respondents would buy consumer products from companies that demonstrated their environmentally sensitive credentials. The emergence of multiple green groups and initiatives may be the result of collective political, industrial, consumer and media exuberance, but they do serve to highlight how seriously the whole issue of energy efficiency is being taken.
However, we also have to accept that there is a very real risk that the sheer volume of green initiatives, labels and targets will make it easier for suppliers to differentiate and harder for customers to compare energy efficiency claims.