Should We Feel Guilty About Using the Cloud Now?

It's getting harder and harder to find blameless activities these days.

For those of us who thought our online lives were fairly environmentally friendly -- buying products on Amazon rather than driving to the store, streaming a movie on Netflix rather than buying or renting a physical disk with all its attendant packaging -- this weekend's New York Times story on data centers served as a rude reminder that all of this bit usage comes at a growing cost, and an increasingly dirty cost.

Data centers waste on average more than 90% of the energy they suck from the grid, the Times found, in research conducted with consultants at McKinsey. Worldwide, data centers use 30 billion watts,…
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