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Sustainable It Issues Examined By The Independent's SustainIT Podcast Series
(This is a transcript of a recent podcast from The Independent.) You're listening to a download from The Independent, in association with BT. Hello, and welcome to the first of three Sustain IT Podcasts brought to you by The Independent. I'm Hamish McRae, the Chief Economic Commentator on The Independent, and with me are my colleagues Michael McCarthy, our Environment Editor, and Jeremy Warner, our Business Editor. We are going to talk about some of the issues surrounding IT and the environment, and I think we should start with a question of the way in which IT can help move us towards a more sustainable economy, but also some of the costs that that carries as well. My own view is that IT, the new technologies in general, are one of the few weapons we have whereby the world can increase its standard of living, without putting too heavy a further footprint on the planet. It's happening already, simple things like re-organising the trucking of supermarkets, so that people delivering the stuff to the markets don't have to make so many calls, and move it with light traffic rather than heavy traffic. Or indeed, home working - one other way in which you substitute an electronic transfer for a physical one. So I think it is one of the weapons, and maybe the chief weapon we have to increase our living standards, which we will want to do in the future, but in a way that doesn't have too heavy a footprint. I agree with that. Clearly there's no doubt that the old fume-belching, smokestack industries that have dotted Britain since the industrial revolution 200 years ago were enormously polluting in their output. I had a friend as a boy whose father owned a factory on the upper reaches of the River Erwell in Lancashire and the River Erwell went into his father's factory as a tumbling stream, crystal clear, and it came out orange on the other side. And there's no doubt that the weight of pollution that heavy industry has put on the environment in industrialised countries is enormous, and most of that has gone, and it is in fact the case that British rivers for example are cleaner now than they have been in general, since the Industrial Revolution. So I agree with what you say, Hamish, but I think it's worth bearing in mind that there is nearly always a price to pay for almost any sort of human activity. We think of man being in harmony with the environment, when he was a hunter-gatherer, but in fact that's not the case; man modified the environment enormously and has done ever since he broke out of being an ape and learned to use fire, and learned to use throwing weapons. The history of humankind has been a long history of environmental degradation, and the point I'm making is that even though new technologies are clearly far more benign than the old technologies with regard to the environment, there is too a price to be paid. One of the prices to be paid is the enormous electricity use that the vast amount of IT power we now have across the world involves. Another for example, is the e-waste or electronic waste that we have, which is now maybe fifty thousand tonnes a year of computer hardware, which is just thrown away by people in the west. And often "out of sight, and out of mind". The idea of the weightless knowledge-based post-industrial economy is great in many respects, but it uses an awful lot of electricity. In fact, according to many projections it will soon be, it may even already be using much more electricity than aviation, which produces lots of protests about the environmental damage that aviation is doing to the planet and it's growing much more rapidly. I do agree also with Hamish that new technologies actually can be used to make the impact of man on the planet less severe. A good example of this is a lot of the thinking that's going on, about not only electricity generation, but also electricity distribution. There's one idea in particular, which is the smart grid. At the moment we just pump the stuff out down wires and people use it, and nearly always people use too much. They leave the kettle on for too long, or they have the tumble dryer on on a boiling hot day or whatever. And a particularly interesting idea is the fact that we could use computer technology on an interactive way, in the way in which the internet is interactive with us to fine tune our electricity demand, right down to very very small tolerances so that for example, when your tumble dryer is pumping away on a boiling hot day, there may be a sensor in there that will actually lower the temperature of the tumble dryer, because it doesn't need it quite so much. Or for example, when you have your electric car, you charge up your electric car, and you find that you don't quite need all the charge, you can sell that back to the grid, instantly. Another good example of how electricity might be saved, one of the biggest grey areas at the moment is so-called Internet hotels, these vast great warehouses that house the servers that make the Internet work, and at the moment they tend to be based close to the centres of IT excellence in California or India or wherever, in relatively hot places, and they require huge amounts of power for air conditioning. There's no reason they have to based in these places, they can be based in much colder places where they won't need so much air conditioning, if any, and indeed there are plans afoot to locate a whole town of these things in places like Iceland or offshore on ships. IT will grow. I don't think there's anything that we can do to stop it, nor should we want to do it. There seems to be just a powerful argument for figuring out how to run our power stations more efficiently, or build more efficient power stations. I like the idea of using servers to heat Iceland; maybe we could use them to heat Aberdeen or other places in Britain that are cold, and also of course figuring out what to do with computer waste, which we touched on, Mike. Yes, I think that's a big problem, because a certain amount of computer waste is sort of shipped away, out of sight out of mind, and goes to the developing countries, where it's actually sometimes taken apart by children, scavenging some of the materials, but some of the materials in computers are toxic, so we have to be very careful about this. I think far more thought goes into the design of computer hardware than goes into how we may dispose of it when it comes to the end of its natural life. I think one thing we all agree is that IT is here to stay, that it gives us opportunities, and this is just an argument for doing it better, finding ways of using what we've got to move towards a more balanced world economy. I don't think networking saves the environment, but it is one of the tools we've got to help us use properly. Moving away from the environment for a while, the idea that the weightless economy provides some kind of panacea and opportunity for sustainable growth is contentious in other respects too. Britain is a classic example of a post-industrial society; less than fifteen percent of our output these days is manufacturing. The rest is largely service based, and transport and so on, and we've become very dependent, in this country in particular on financial services, which for many years politicians have trumpeted as a fantastic success story, and yet here we are in the midst of what may be the biggest economic contraction since the nineteen thirties and that has partly been caused, arguably been caused, by the explosion we've had in the last ten years in particular in financial services. So using sustainable in a different sense; sustainable growth, the idea that the weightless economy provides sustainable growth guaranteed has been somewhat challenged by recent events. So no quick fixes, but actually an area which is hugely important, and something that we're very pleased at The Independent to have this opportunity of writing more about. That's it for this time, I'm Hamish McRae, and joining me in the discussion were Michael McCarthy and Jeremy Warner. Join us again next time when we will be taking a look at turning working into sustainable networking. Do please join us. That was a download from The Independent, in association with BT. A video of this presentation can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4dG6_1EF9U
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