Set aside for a moment the vagueness of “green,” and let’s ask a different question.  In an era where travel is being replaced by virtual conferencing, shopping by eCommerce, and partying by Second Life, what is the carbon cost of all of our time online?

I wrote a piece over at eCo Times which ran last week that looks into the carbon footprint of data centers.  Here’s an excerpt:

According to The Economist, which quotes tier one researchers McKinsey And Company and the Uptime Institute, the data centers that host and serve the world’s registered web services, accounted for 1.2% of the world’s electricity in 2005. This amount of electricity was emitting more carbon dioxide than Argentina or The Netherlands, and this was before many of the biggest web services came online.

At the end of 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report that details the impact of data centers on the environment. Like any complex report, varying conclusions can be drawn, so feel free to check it out and draw your own. Nonetheless, these analysts, who project data center growth and related carbon emissions, predict that data centers could become worse polluters than the airline transportation industry by 2020. That’s just 12 years from now. Wow.

The truth — or at least my perspective on what the truth may be — is that technology will evolve, and get more efficient faster than air travel will.  Here’s what’s happening on the evolutionary front:

Renewably powered data centers are popping up. Many of these centers will still need to be tied to the grid to guarantee performance. (Do you want iTunes to work only when the wind is blowing? Didn’t think so.) They’re not 100% perfect, but it’s a good start. Green House Data is shifting to wind power and IBM opened it’s “greenest” data center, which will be partially powered by more than 1 million kilowatt hours of wind energy.

Servers are getting greener. The industry has banded together to create The Green Grid. The companies who make the servers and other hardware for data centers are working on initiatives to reduce power consumption in each unit, which can have a huge impact overall. (Look out for some of the greenwashing by these companies, they’re a long way from total sustainability.)

Software is slowly getting more efficient. It’s still early on this one, but there are efforts to write very clean code that will use fewer computing cycles, and ultimately less power to achieve the same outcome. Google has always been about very lightweight applications, but it’s going to take a long time for YouTube, World of Warcraft, Netflix and others to figure out how to reduce the impact of those high-bandwidth products. Microsoft’s legendary spaghetti code may be the worst offender of all, if measured in terms of overall relative impact. Local firm Rally Software is doing a good job helping many of the web services companies develop cleaner code. Rally is leading the industry by striving to be a zero emissions company, although they’re the first to admit they’re facing some big hurdles along the way.

What’s the nuance?

As more and more people become interested not in the green appearance of their life- and work-style, but in the actual sustainability therein, the analysis becomes even harder.  What’s missing here?  We didn’t investigate the sustainability of the manufacture and delivery of all the devices that connect us to the internet, nor the energy costs associated with running your laptops, cell phones, iPods and everything else.

There is a bigger and bigger backlash against the technophilia that has characterized the past two decades, as evidenced in a couple running email discussions, any Boulder sustainability soiree, or the comments in my eCo Times piece.  But in the end, the tools are still more efficient than any that have come before.

The opportunity to redefine sustainable technology is at the core of the American dream — the winners here will be rewarded handsomely, while those who choose to ignore these costs (is Bill leaving Microsoft another stroke of brilliance???) will pay dearly in the marketplace.