We face ongoing climate crises, in soil, air, water, chemical waste, not to mention fertilizers and plastics. All of these are associated with mining waste, commercial waste, data waste and e-waste.
Well we have no hope of solving the problem we face by just focusing on a CO2 measurement. In fact, too much focus on carbon dioxide will make the overall problem worse because incentives to reduce CO2 increase the damage caused by other elements.
What I mean
For years, the data center industry has touted its energy efficiency as if it were the only metric that mattered.
The media and governments bought it or were bought.
If you were trying to learn about data center failures, it was almost impossible. One of the most secretive industries on earth, data centers prefer to exist as anonymous giant warehouses without even logos or names.
If you wanted to learn about water use or e-waste production, from data centers it was almost impossible. Google went so far as to classify its water usage as a "trade secret", meaning the local community had no right to know how much water was being used.
Only after a protracted court case, started by a small independent newspaper called The Oregonian/Oregon Live, was Google reluctantly forced to disclose its water use. It should be noted that it is a universal right to know what water data centers use, and this was not claimed by the New York Times or the Washington Post, but by a small local media outlet.
Why would data centers go to such lengths to hide their water usage?
"The reason there is not much transparency, in simple words, I think most of them Companies they've fouled their nest," said Kyle Myers, vice president at CyrusOne, a data company center. Myers explained that one of the best ways to reduce usage energyand cost was the transition from electric air conditioning to water cooling. "Water is extremely cheap," Myers explained.
Another way to reduce energy usage and costs was to use the latest servers. Every time a new server design came out, even if it had a small performance gain, data centers would buy it and replace their "old" servers.
Their old servers may have only been two years old. Yes, but these "old" servers had caused enormous environmental damage during their construction.
Nobody cares about e-waste.
All the media and governments care about is reducing CO2. Although, ironically, a server causes 1-2 tons of CO2 to produce. For this reason the ridiculous term "dematerialization" was invented.
From wikipedia : dematerialization (products), using less or no hardware to provide the same level of functionality.
- Do you still think recycling is happening?
- Recycling and conflict of interest
- Where does the recycling go?
- Yes, unfortunately: Recycling is a fairy tale
CO2 prices and material use look better, because our innovative companies are finding better and better ways to hide the damage by greenwashing.
Everything is interconnected. We need a genuine system environmental accounting. We must finally calculate the true and total cost of what we are doing to the environment.
