A recent McKinsey report discusses the impact of IT, both bad and good on the environment in a report, Information and communications technologies will become a major source of greenhouse gas emissions but can abate far more of them. It first reports the bad side.
“These technologies now account for 0.86 metric gigatons of emissions a year, or about 2 percent of the emissions added to the atmosphere globally. The world’s increasing need for computation, data storage, and communications is driving rapid growth in the emissions associated with such technologies. By 2020, they will account for about 3 percent of all emissions: 1.54 metric gigatons, or twice what the United Kingdom produces today. What’s more, this figure assumes that significant efforts will be made to improve the energy efficiency of devices, components, other equipment, and data centers.”
Then it goes into how this effect might be mitigated. They looked at five areas and identified potential annual reductions of 7.8 metric gigatons of carbon emissions by 2020. These include optimizing energy usage in millions of buildings, smart controls to make motor systems in factories more efficient, sensors in grids to monitor the distribution of power more efficiently, smart transportation systems (such as managing complicated trucking logistics), and “dematerializing” physical goods and processes through telecommuting, video conferencing, internet shopping, and more digital content than never gets to a physical mode.
As someone who works at home, I see many time saving ways to do stuff through the web that does not require me to get into my car and add to the carbon emissions. It also saves time and money. The dematerialization can take many directions. First, there is SOA – (see Making IT More Green and Saving Money at the Same Time Through SOA). Then there are virtual events (see – Virtual Environments for Business: Unisfair). Many of the enterprise 2.0 offerings enhance virtual collaboration, another way to save money and carbon (e.g., Cisco and WebEx Combine Strengths to Launch New Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform).
I think the McKinsey report was good but it just scratched the surface. We need to get busy with this stuff. I am going to writing more about some others possibilities in this direction.
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