IT industry latest envirocriminals

According to a report from New Scientist, the IT industry is the latest in a long series of environmental criminal organizations, plotting the demise of Mother Gaia:

"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year — a similar figure to the global airline industry.

The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.

Of course, the solution is to scrap all those inefficient, Gaia-raping computers and go back to the practice of keeping all data on paper, tabulated by hand. Think of all the millions and millions of people who will be able to get jobs as office clerks, archivists, shipping/receiving clerks (to handle the vast increase in paper shipments), paper mill workers, and lumberjacks this wonderful innovation would benefit.

Let's just ignore the false correlation between air travel growth and data storage capacity growth, shall we? It's about as meaningful as comparing the rate of growth of any two radically dissimilar things.

After posting this, I might suggest the magazine change its name to New Credulist.

H/T to James Lileks.