Scientific progress is full of skepticism. Diversity in opinion we see in global warming debate is one example. Scientific process itself is a data driven journey.

Have we established the need for Green Computing as a sure shot way of reducing our climate footprint? Hardly!

All we have achieved is a framework level understanding that we need to do something. Draft scientific model which basically pleads with us that we must adjust our way of life and our way of doing business.

Richard Hawkins, Canada Research Chair in Social Contexts of Technology at University of Calgary, is about to shake conventional green IT thinking – by questioning whether Green IT really reduces our environmental footprint.

Hawkins research report is important. It will help decide how much budget OECD will allocate in IT and Sustainability Initiative – important part of Earth Summit, to be held in Copenhagen.

“It was once assumed that there was little or no material dimension to information technology, thus, it should be clean with minimal environmental impact,” says Hawkins who is also a professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture. “However, we are finding that reality is much more complicated.”

Firstly, Hawkins notes that digital technologies require a lot of energy to manufacture and eventually they create a huge pile of ‘electronic junk’, much of it highly toxic. They also use a lot of energy to run. Some estimates are that they use up roughly the same amount of energy as the world’s air transport system.

He thinks, rightly so in many cases, many vendors are just piling on green bandwagon and indulging in green washing.

Far from denying these environmental implications, Hawkins points out that many IT producers are gearing up to produce ‘greener IT’, using the environmental footprint as a marketing tool. “But probably most of the negative environmental impacts occur in the form of completely unintended, second and third order effects,” he says. “These ‘rebound’ effects may not be mitigated by inventing ‘greener’ IT products and, indeed, may be intensified by such changes.”

He picks on unintended consequences of using mobile phone in explaining rebound phenomena

Rebounds occur when the use of IT contributes to or reinforces an increase in other activities that already have environmental effects.

“For example, technologies such as cell phones actually help us to become hyper-mobile,” he says. “We didn’t adopt the mobile phone so we could drive and talk on the phone, we adopted it because we were already driving so much. Creating a greener cell phone won’t reduce the impact of increased mobility. The real question is what amount of mobility is sustainable?”

Hawkins has a solution which he will be presenting in next month conference.

Hawkins says the problem is not that IT is inherently more or less green than other technologies. The problem is that it has been applied so extensively that its environmental implications—positive as well as negative—are often overlooked. Hawkins and his research team are establishing a more reliable basis for identifying and assessing the contribution of IT to our environmental footprint.

By building a taxonomy rich database of IT’s environmental impact, we can establish clear metrics around positive and negative environmental implications.

At the very least this will stop lot of CIOs from flying blind. This will also prevent them from getting hijacked by green washing propoganda!

[picture taken from UCalgary Website]