Going green – the only Green I care about
Honestly I’m fed up with all the “Going Green”, “Save the Planet” bullshit that’s been piling up since a couple of years already.
Of course I want to save the planet and have a nice and clean place to live on this earth. But it seems to be that everything people say now is too exaggerated.
The planet has been dying for a long time, probably since people started building cities. Trying to exaggerate everything now to get people to realize it and change something faster seems like poorly-done mass advertising.
Coming back to the green that interests me since I work in IT/programming:
- Moving to Virtual Servers to optimize hardware usage on physical servers to drastically reduce the number of servers and completely eliminate old (power-hungry) servers.
- Optimizing application code, up to the point where it doesn’t really pay to optimize more to make applications work faster and use fewer resources and thus servers.
- Letting your computers sleep/hibernate and having components that use less energy when not in full use. Also using efficient power supplies.
I fully support these since I consider them the good kind of green technology. Sure, it helps save the planet but that is a side-effect. The real green feature is the green that goes back into your pocket. All of these mean less computers, less servers, less power consumption. And this means cold green cash. Cash that if you’re a philanthropist you can donate to making the planet a better place.
But even if you’re someone who doesn’t care about the environment, who only cares about his own pocket (especially in these economic times) you will be saving the planet as a side-effect of saving your money.
So in conclusion, please, Go Green. But go green not because of guilt, go green because it’s good business. I imagine this is much for motivating for a lot of people than the guilt of cleaning up the mess of past generations.