Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Draft of Greening IT Online Book launched today




Greening IT book launched to coincide with Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference

Download the PDF here http://greening.it/book/releases

The Project

Behind the project

Green IT has a great potential to help society optimise resource use, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To increase awareness on this potential, we are writing a non-profit making internationally collaborative book, released under a Creative Commons license

Why Green IT?

Today Western economices are largely characterised by service-based economies, sustained by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Our economies evolves around ICT: Our public sector is based on it, the financial sector is based on it, the energy sector, the transport system, the education system, the health system - all are largely dependent on Information Technology.
Our societies developed this way, because IT was able to make daily routines easier, quicker and more efficient. IT has optimised a number of processes and has helped society progress.
Globally IT is responsible for around 2%. of the world's emission of greenhouse gases. The IT sector itself contributes, through its massive consumption of energy, to greenhouse gas emissions – and thereby continuously adds to the cause of the problem. At the same time, however, the IT industry can provide the ‘technological fixes’ we need to reduce emissions and form a solid base for the Low-Carbon society. We call this Green IT.

What about climate change?

The majority of scientists today, believe that climate change is caused by the emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The most common greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide or CO2, which is emitted as a result of consumption (incineration) of fossil fuels. All sectors of society and all IT components require energy to perform their function – thus contributing to climate change.
The effects of climate change is global warming that causes melting glaciers, rising sea-levels, floods and droughts, more extreme weather events etc. All in all the effects of climate change will make life on Earth more difficult, and it will hit the hardest in low-lying and poor areas.
Climate Change and Global Warming are the effects of unsustainable consumption patterns in an industrialised world. And most people are by now convinced that we need to solve the problem, to avoid severe consequences on the environment and on our livelihoods.
IT plays an important role in this development due to its potential to further optimise processes and routines. What we want is a Low-Carbon Society where industrial processes have been optimised, energy production have been turned green (based on renewable energy) and consumption in general has been transformed to a more sustainable path.

Scope of interest

To further explore the potential for Green IT to help the climate and safe the planet - we are collecting material for a book.
We are interested in IT solutions that have a positive effect on CO2-emissions. Yet, the solutions should not only contribute to solve the problem, but should also help 'fix' the cause of the problem of climate change. A good example here, is the solution that Copenhagen Consensus Center's economists came up with (Aug 2009: Copenhagen Consensus Center): That it is cheaper to solve global warming by sending out a fleet of special built ships spraying seawater droplets into marine clouds to make them reflect more sunlight. It may solve the immediate problem, but it does not tackle the general flaws in consumption patterns that will continue to cause problems, if not attended to. Therefore it does not support our purpose to progress on the way to a Low-Carbon Society.
I have also agreed to be a contributor for later revisions of this book and will be discussing my favourite topic of Thin Client computing and desktop virtualisation.
More info at http://greening.it
A list of contributors can be found here http://greening.it/contributors
Download a PDF draft copy of the book from 









1 comment:

North Jersey Air Systems said...

It is the need of the hour to know more about the green movement and follow it.There is so much pollution in the environment that there is ill health and death from it.