Cloud computing’s dirty little secret (and how to fix it)

These days, everybody uses the cloud. We stream our TV shows from the cloud, store our music in the cloud, and even keep our backups in the cloud. It’s fast, convenient, and prevents the need for owning a bunch of HDDs you’ve got to sort through and plug in every time you want to watch Friends. Plus, it just sounds good. The cloud. Doesn’t it just make you think of this?

Looks pleasant, right? And that’s the kind of picture you’ll get from most cloud computing providers, who tout their services as convenient, economical, and even eco-friendly. But unfortunately, the degree to which that final claim – that the cloud is eco-friendly – is true varies quite a bit. In many cases, especially in Asia, your cloud may look more like this:

Because it’s often happening behind far away from you, it’s easy to forget, but the IT industry is a tremendous consumer of power. As a result, it generates quite a bit of pollution. By 2007, it was already generating about 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gasses, making it about equivalent to the global aviation industry. But of course, the tech industry has grown fast, especially in developing Asia, and the impact is almost certainly even larger now. Yes, the tech industry is worse for the earth than the thousands of massive, oil-guzzling planes that fly around the world daily.

Here’s the good news: using cloud computing over local storage is probably a net gain in terms of environmental impact. Putting all the data together in central locations and serving it from there is more efficient than having things stored locally all over the planet, and it cuts down on the need to make goods like hard drives – the design, production, packaging, and shipping of which requires energy and releases carbon dioxide.

But make no mistake, cloud computing isn’t exactly clean. Cloud data centers can use enough energy to power tens of thousands of homes, and they waste shocking amounts of water, too.

Moreover, while data centers are efficient in theory, they aren’t always in practice. For example, most keep all their servers cooled and running 24/7, regardless of whether they’re all actually in use. This means that although cloud computing can be more green and more efficient than local storage, it can also be even worse for the environment in some specific cases. Especially if you’re storing your data with a provider that draws energy from coal-fired power plants.

What’s the solution? Clean-energy cloud data centers. It may not help with the water waste, but clean energy like solar and wind can reduce or even eliminate the carbon footprint of your cloud computing.

Why should I care?

Let me address the immediate question: why should you care? For many of you, the answer to that is obvious. But for those who perhaps haven’t been following closely, here’s a very quick climate science lesson: historical data shows us that when atmospheric CO2 goes up, the global average temperature goes up too. Currently, we have an atmospheric CO2 level of more than 400 parts per million, higher than it has ever been in at least the last 800,000 years. So the earth is going to get hotter, but this increase in heat also increases the intensity of storms and flooding. Major storms and floods already devastate Asia’s coasts and islands each year. Continuing to pump CO2 into the air is making it worse.

Increasing atmospheric CO2 leads to ocean acidification, too. That has the potential to totally devastate the ocean’s ecosystems, and even if you don’t care about fish, you probably care about human food supply – a lot of our food, especially in Southeast Asia – comes from the sea. (So does a lot of the oxygen we breathe, so in the long run if we kill all sea life we’ll literally be killing ourselves).