Internet

(2/05/2009) - Green Tech Media is reporting that, “the ever-expanding IP network probably eliminates more carbon than it creates.”  Or so says Subodh Bapat, the vice president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s largest makers of computer servers and data storage systems. 

The arguments he makes (or at least the ones Green Tech Media quote him as making), are pretty flimsy. "You would have printed a lot more brochures. You would have printed more books. You would have traveled more. You have online shopping," he said. "A lot of stuff has become more efficient."

I don’t want to take a position on whether or not the internet is carbon negative (as Bapat argues) or carbon neutral or what have you, partly because I just don’t know, but also because it is impossible to know what the world would look like without the invention of the computer and the internet.

The Typewriter’s Advocate – Why the Internet and Computers are Bad for the Finite World