In a nutshell, the human race is increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As these are increased, they trap more sunlight, warming the earth, hence the “greenhouse gas” effect. Enough of me explaining, have a look at the climate change section on the Friends Of The Earth website. We are burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees, the natural carbon dioxide soak.
Now clearly there are a lot of negative effects to global warming, generally termed “climate change”. We are seeing increased extreme weather in some parts of the world and in others winters are warmer. I can speak from first hand experience here. This week I was skiing; there was very little snow and the temperature in the resort was only slightly above freezing point. London used to have “frost fairs” when the river froze over. The last of these was 1814. I think this indicates global warming is not all our fault and has been building up for a long time. Unfortunately it is now our problem.
The answer has to be to reduce the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere. This can be achieved in two ways; reducing the amount of CO2 we produce and removing more CO2 from the atmosphere. Reducing carbon production has been tackled globally through the Kyoto Protocol, however major polluters such as the USA have not signed up; the USA emits 20 metric tons per person (2003 figures) compared to 9.5 metric tons per person in the UK and 2.7 metric tons in China. By the way, I’m not bashing the US here, I’m just using these examples to show how it is possible to match economic development with CO2 production.
The other option is to offset carbon use and there are plenty of companies offering to offset personal and corporate carbon production – planting trees for example. This seems like a sensible approach however many environmental organisations are suggesting that carbon offsetting is being seen as an easy way to buy off your carbon pollution (trees take a long time to reach their full carbon soaking potential). I’ll look more at carbon offsetting later.
How does this affect the storage world and consulting? Well, it’s easy to see that we can reduce our carbon emissions by consuming less energy as we wouldn’t need to burn as many fossil fuels to produce energy. So, energy efficient storage products have to be good. For me personally, I will be looking at my energy usage and seeing how I can offset the carbon I can’t avoid using – and so become carbon neutral.
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