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Green IT - How dirty is your web site?

Posted in Green

Green IT

Green IT - How dirty is your web site?

How much energy is required to power your web site? In our day-to-day activities, we may not think about our web site as using a lot of energy because, as a business owner, you may spend a great deal of your effort growing your business and your web site. After all, you have made an investment in your web site. You spent valuable company resources planning it - choosing a domain name, hiring a web designer, a graphic designer to illustrate your concept, programmers, and writers to populate it with original content. Your web site is an investment. And as business owners, we focus on the success of our company web site and the business as a whole. It's a labor of love.

Internet Growth

There are close to 130 million web sites on line at the moment and every day, 6,000 new web sites launch, creating entrepreneurs by the thousands. The world wide web is a great way to take control of your professional life (you’re the boss) or to add a few bucks to your household income each month while you keep your day job.

More and more people use the web to make purchases, comparison shop, find directions to a local business or even buy their groceries on the web, the fastest growing marketplace ever. Given the number of options web users have, as a business owner or webmaster, you are actually asking site visitors to do you a favor — to visit your web site and purchase your products or opt-in to your newsletter. And web visitors are more likely to perform a favor for you if you establish trust on your web site by demonstrating your responsibility.

Is your green web host "green"?

While a few companies have clearly understood that the source of energy is a critical factor in how green or dirty a web site is, the web hosting sector as a whole still seeks to define "green" as being "more efficient".

What is a Data Center?

Data centers are run-of-the-mill buildings, often out of the public eye, yet increasingly large in size, and they are the fastest growing source of IT energy use. These buildings house the internet, business and telecommunications systems, and store the bulk of our data. In the US, which hosts approximately 40% of the world’s data center servers, it is estimated that server farms consume close to 3% of the national power supply.

Efficiency is Not Enough

It is true that the IT sector has steadily demonstrated improvements in energy efficiency and has made significant improvements toward reducing the energy consumption of its data centers after many years of neglect. However, efficient IT is not necessarily Green IT.

We are not going to solve the climate problem via efficiency - we must move to cleaner sources of energy.

Bill Wheil, Google Energy Czar (11 March 2011 - Climate One Forum on Cloud Computing)

IT Choices Matter

We cannot achieve the level of reduction needed to protect the planet without IT energy solutions that will allow us to transition away from dirty energy sources and build our economic and planetary prosperity on clean sources of energy such as solar, wind, and water.

Opportunities in the IT Industry to Go Green

Adoption of clean energy investment incentives specific to the IT sector for energy efficiency and renewable energy deployment.
Development of cost-effective, regionally compatible sources of renewable power generation for data centers (such as solar, wind, tidal and wave power).
Additional investments toward the development and deployment of grid infrastructure and energy storage technology to enable much higher utilization of variable energy sources, such as wind and solar.

Where to find Renewable Energy?

SmartestEnergy - is the leading purchaser and supplier of renewable energy from the independent generation sector in the UK and it offers customers the opportunity to choose the proportion and mix of renewables, including wind, hydro and biomass.
GreenQloud, a company located in Iceland, is powered 100% by geothermal and hydropower energy, delivering hosting and storage services. The Star Peak Energy Center31, though still in concept phase, is also pushing a vision of renewably powered data. The company plans to generate geothermal power and attract data center operators to locate their facilities at its site and purchase Star Peak’s renewable energy.
i/o Data Centers is installing a massive solar array on top of its new 580,000 sq ft facility in Phoenix, with 5,000 panels that will generate a total 4.5MW at peak capacity.

Truly Green

A company that takes responsibility for its energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions will demonstrate a high level of responsibility in its core values.

This includes:

the direct purchase or installation of renewable energy to power its infrastructure
avoiding emissions through energy efficiency.

Perception is reality on the world wide web, and if site visitors perceive that your web site has integrity, and your delivery of services or products demonstrates that you’re a trustworthy businessperson, you will see more and more repeat sales. Build trust with site visitors and you will build business with site visitors. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Green Restructuring of the U.S. Economy

Posted in Green

Green restructuring of the U.S. Economy

“Green” Restructuring of the U.S. Economy

Most of us think of "green" in terms of the environment. We buy recycled products, purchase LED lights, drive less, and reuse products as much as we can — all in an effort to help improve the environment. But it’s not only about the environment. A lot of times, it’s about the economy too. No longer is "green" associated with a stereotype of hippies, but it is more mainstream and even expected that companies make responsible business decisions based on the environment and protecting it. Indeed, the general awakening of global movements that have a common goal: to help the environment, are becoming a major focus of attention. The fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy that grew from western industrial societies is no longer a viable model and many movements across the United States are moving to change this model.

Power to the People and a Clean-Energy Economy

Two common goals: a cleaner future and a just America — There was an incredible energy with more than ten-thousand young leaders gathered in Washington, D.C for the Power Shift 2011 event. The energized and passionate young leaders who have committed themselves to shaping a green future in their own neighborhoods met and over the course of four days, these participants took part in training, workshops, panels, and actions. They heard from leaders in the environmental movement and learned how to take these lessons back to their communities. Participants engaged in three campaigns:

Catalyzing the Clean Energy Economy - Building the ground force for clean tech growth and job creation
Campus Climate Challenge 2.0 - Transforming higher education into the innovation hub for a clean energy society.
Beyond Dirty Energy - Campaign to fight for the rights of every community to have access to clean air and water, healthy food and an EPA that’s allowed to do its job.

Other notable organizations are gaining strong followings, such as Green For All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

Co-Ops and Green Restructuring

Budding alliances between worker-owned and -managed companies are becoming more common. Worker-owned and -managed businesses combine the romance of entrepreneurship with solid family values and commitment to a strong community. “What’s not to like?” said Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts. In the past, even the socially responsible business movements paid little attention to true workplace democracy. This has changed as worker co-operatives and co-operative businesses have become a powerful force in America and are gaining traction.

If these alliances work, it might make a system of worker-owned enterprises assembled with the purpose of a green restructuring of the U.S. economy. That could be a powerful force.

Human Rights for Mother Nature

Former Obama "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones is taking up the challenge as one of the newest board members of a San Francisco organization known as the Pachamama Alliance, which has been creating a global movement to make human rights for Mother Nature an international reality — complete with enforceable laws — by 2014. Jones joined the alliance's board last December, shortly after the organization announced creation of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature to carry the concept around the world—and install it not only in international law but in the statutes of communities and municipalities across the U.S.

Jones has continued to promote those ideas since leaving the Obama administration. His green community organizing skills apparently are going global, along with the Pachamama Alliance’s rights-for-nature campaign.

Services from Nature

The services that nature provides in order for many large corporations to survive are, at times, not taken into account. Air, water, soil, raw material, climate regulation, pollination — without any of these, there would be no economy. So it only seems just that as many companies join the green movement and work towards more efficient usage of their energy allowance, the wave of green energy consortiums has grown across the globe and these environmentally-responsible companies prosper, along with the environment.

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