By Reading This Blog You Are Killing Bambis Mom
Hello Kittens! Big Daddy has some bad news for you today I’m afraid. By reading this blog you are single handedly killing every last living creature on earth. The sky will burn, the oceans will boil, volcanos will erupt and after mankind has been forced to live upon catamarans armed with machine guns for a while because the world becomes one big puddle and grow gills, will eventually perish. I hope you’re proud of yourself, perhaps now you’d enjoy some nice cleansing self flagellation.
It turns out according in the Britain’s Guardian newspaper yesterday, the internet has become rather popular these days and therefore uses quite a bit of energy. Who knew that by playing hours of online poker whilst simultaneously downloading ring tones and porn while checking your email, shopping on eBay and making sure you Twitter as much of your life story as humanly possible one sentence at a time, might actually have some environmental repercussions and end up murdering a baby seal or two as if you personally swung the club? Apparently, that’s exactly what you’re doing, you naughty, naughty web surfer you. I suspect you may want to take a moment for self reflection and behead a few crying tiger cubs. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Now that you’ve had a nice refreshing glass if dying baby tiger tears, here’s how it goes. It seems a pack of scientists and industry leaders had a chit chat with The Guardian about how companies like Google, Microsoft, Sun and so on are crapping microchips over the cost of energy to deliver one and a half billion internet users billions of web pages, videos and files online. It’s interesting what happens when you read a newspaper for something other than the gossip section, and especially one from (gasp!) another country than your own. You pick up a nugget or two.
Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of web servers is a guy who probably knows a thing or two about this stuff. He said in the article “In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption,” “We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more,” he said. “If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm.”Jesus tap dancing christ, that doesn’t sound good does it?
It turns out that the energy footprint of the internet is growing at 10% per year and that according to Credit Suisse, the good folks at YouTube are going to get Dirty Sanchezed and lose roughly $470m this year because of the high cost of delivering all of those videos of people being hit in the balls that we can’t seem to live without anymore. Companies like Google, YouTube, Microsoft are pissing themselves not only over the cost of energy that is only going to continue to grow, but how their carbon debt has gone all Hiroshimaey and is now even bigger than the airline industry. To put that into prospective, peoples use of the internet for things like stalking people you dated in high school has a greater negative effect on the planet than flying planes loaded with overweight American tourists to Europe so they can speak too loudly on their cell phones in restaurants about how they can’t get a decent cheeseburger anywhere and how nobody speaks ‘American’.
Now we all enjoy the internet. Some folks even make a living goofing off on it (tee hee). It’s great for Googling things, it helps lazy drunken students do their homework so they can pretend to learn stuff, nauseating skanks like Tila Tequilla can use it to get famous, you can post every last ambient thought you’ve ever had about the daily minutia of your life on a social networking site or blog, it’s swell for shopping for even more and more stuff online, everybody loves those emails friends and co-workers send each other not so comically slagging the opposite sex, there’s all that wonderful celebrity gossip and some really super fun folks like Gary Glitter get to play around on it and have a jolly good time on it, so much so that occasionally some Thai policemen want to talk to them about it. Yessiree, the internet and all of its many good uses fucking rock. It’s a shame that it we may as well all harpoon a whale every time we use it. Sorry about that Shamu, but the folks really enjoy Twitter.
So by now folks on both side of the energy debate should really be shitting themselves. It’s one thing to talk about things, but threaten something important like your favorite porno site and people get SERIOUS. If you put your ear to your hard drive you will hear cries coming from around the world of “but what about my blog! I have so much to share about my life!” That is the kind of thing that wakes people up and gets their attention pretty damned quick and may possibly do the previously unthinkable, research it for themselves.
Sadly, that won’t be to easy. The good folks at Google see these things as trade secrets and are clamming up on the subject. They won’t talk about how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have. Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California who is a fellow who seems like he also knows a bit about this kind of thing, did a study on it. He said that US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.
Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year. “Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services,” he said. “It’s a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand.” He also pointed out that this would lead to communications disruptions and would cost businesses millions every hour.
Google is taking this stuff so seriously that they are actually doing something about it. Hell, they’re Google, I should hope so. Urs Hölzle, a guy with the most impressive name yet who really sounds like he knows something about this stuff told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. “You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don’t have exponential growth of revenue to go with it,” and that “With good engineering we’re trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up.”
I’ve never been a man to argue with anyone whose name contains that many consonants and an umlaut. If they can be bothered to learn how to pronounce their own names and take the time to put a couple of dots over the vowels, then chances are they have a little something upstairs. Urs and his gang has gone so far as to fork out $2.3bn by building it’s own its own data centres, but nobody seems to know if they are working yet. Companies like Microsoft are trying things like new cooling methods and using older technology that can be found in older laptops because the batteries are more energy efficient. So there you have it. While people are debating away online and dicking around about who is right we are wiping our asses with a rain forrest, companies like Google are dumping billions of dollars into finding ways for you to still check up on your ex on Facebook for free, and trying to slay fewer panda bears while doing it.
The companies aren’t getting any more revenue from advertisers of their trouble either. They are doing this for free, so you can still surf their sites for free and provide their advertisers with affordable rates. They are taking expensive measures to find a way to deal with their energy costs and find way in which to least fuck up the planet. You can still read and contribute to all the blogs you wish until your heart is content and until the reading of this particular blog to could have done so without realizing you may as well just ignited a small mountain of cast away truck tires and thrown some giraffes onto the flames for all the good you are doing for the environment.
No matter what side of the nuclear argument you are on, you have to admire these companies. They owe absolutely nothing to anybody other than their shareholders, workers, advertisers and users. They could care less about the impact it has on the earth. They could just find new ways to streamline themselves or pass on the costs to the end user, you, but they don’t.
Our government(s) sure haven’t spent $2.3bn on research to find new and better solutions for the end user, but they damned sure have charged us in taxes. Google is making certain that they never suffer a brown out of their service thus causing problems for the people who are trying to watch dancing banana peels on YouTube and are would like you to murder fewer badly burned Albanian boys so while you are doing it. Our government(s) haven’t considered any of these things as part of their quest to make the world a greener place. If the government gets its way no matter what kind of investments companies like Google make, these things will still happen anyway because they will be reliant on whatever power source they have to draw upon. The goverment took the advice of some kid with a myspace page and decided that it was just lovely (because if you can’t trust myspace folks, then who can you trust) and they should believe them. Perhaps if we can find anything unifying in determining which way we should proceed is to look at the things that effect us, and what we are prepared to do about them. If we don’t think things like paying a few extra bucks is worth investigating, then how about something really important that effects us all. THIS!
