Green Summit 2008: Cleaning Up Our Act

Flipping the switch on your campus laptop is a nice step, but it’s not nearly enough to make a dent in the world’s growing environmental problems, said Bill St. Arnaud, the chief research officer for CANARIE, Inc., Canada’s Advanced Internet Development Organization. He argued that global warming is one of, if not the greatest threat to our future society and economy and the notion that energy efficiency will solve the problem conveys the wrong message, making a complex and potentially “unsolvable” problem seem solvable. “[Energy efficiency] is great but it’s not a surrogate for a policy in reducing your carbon footprint,” says St. Arnaud, who made a “zero carbon” strategy the focus of his opening keynote, “The Future is Now: The Role of Green IT.”

At the start of his talk, he painted a sometimes bleak picture of carbon emissions on campus, particularly those related to IT and cyberinfrastructure. While the media tends to focus on the emissions of planes and vehicles, a single computer server can produce as much CO2 as an SUV. And the typical university produces between 200,000 – 500,000 tons of CO2 each year, almost half of which comes from IT and cyberinfrastructure. Before we help others, St. Arnaud said, “We have to clean up our own act first.”

The argument for a campus to reduce its carbon footprint isn’t just an environmental one, he argued, it’s a financial one. Citing the growing worldwide carbon trading system, he argued that a university who performs an inventory of their carbon footprint and then undertakes steps to reduce it could cash in under a cap and trade system. At a national level, the revenue generated from a cap and trade system might fund national broadband or a national health care system.

To reduce their footprint, universities might consider relocating data centers off-site to areas with renewable energy or relying on cloud computing and virtualization. He argued that campuses have an opportunity to lead the nation toward a zero-carbon society, by reducing their own footprints, researching ways that technology might help reduce emissions perhaps through sharing infrastructure, eliminating those “server huggers” who receive a server through a grant, underutilize it, and then refuse to release it, or even investing in local “carbon rewards” programs that reward students and faculty who take steps to reduce their own emissions. He said that universities may also lead the way in researching a new national effort at reducing emissions. For instance, what would be the impact of carbon taxes, cap and trade, carbon offsets, or carbon neutrality imposed by law.

Despite the dire statistics, St. Arnaud suggested there may be great opportunities for higher education and IT, in particular, to lead a new zero-carbon effort. “Global warming is not a simple problem,” he said. “But we have to attack it somehow.”