Today is Blog Action Day which poses the question ” What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? ” The theme this year is the environment.

Sitting around after the unconference on Thursday on the River Deck of the State Library of Queensland, with a circle of mellow librarians sipping wine and eating fine cheeses, my old friend Liz quietly asked

“Has anyone thought about what will be the effect on our libraries of Peak Oil ? “.

Taken aback, I don’t think we gave it the consideration it deserved.

One librarian from the Gatton library speculated what would happen to libraries who had decided to purchase all major reference works as online works. The Co-Pilot mentioned an article published in New Scientist in December 2006 about an energy audit of the cost of transmitting and downloading data. “We carry on as though it was free and forget that it’s not”.

I fervently hoped that no-one would point out that I’d taken a plane flight just to talk to a mob of people. I’ve made 11 plane flights in the last year – with no attempt to offset the carbon waste generated . According to the calculator at Carbon Neutral Australia, the 32 724 flight miles I clocked up this year emitted 11.3 tonnes of carbon waste and needs 67 trees to offset it. Qantas offers to offset my flight from Perth to Brisbane for just $3.93.

I think we’ll hear voices like Liz’ more often. And maybe we’ll start listening and engaging better than we did on Friday – or when Matthew Nogrady raised environmental issues on librariesinteract.info back in February and received no responses, Global warming, engaging by example.

Below is a copy of a post I made in January 2007 about the New Scientist article, The waste at the heart of the web: every time you search Google, a data centre stirs into life wasting heaps of energy. What can be done?,. I kept it private until I could double check the soundness of the research – as the findings from Mark Mills , who is mentioned in the article, have been debated. I haven’t had time or chance to follow up on the figures, but here’s what I thought at the start of the year.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

PRICING VERSUS COST

There’s a difference between pricing and cost. It’s always bugged me. Jeans with a price tag of $80 to me, may have been produced at the cost of the air being polluted in China.

Our websites seem the ultimate in the ethereal. No factories, no gunk poured into waters, no trucks transporting the information from city to city. An article in last month’s New Scientist had me thinking about the real costs of the upsurge in images, audio and video which are becoming our everyday tools. PCs working hard get hot. They use their fans. Lots. It costs.

To quote the article:

… servers in the US alone are already using more electricity than 1.3 million homes–some 14.8 terawatt-hours per year, according to 2004 figures from the California-based Electric Power Research Institute. In terms of the individual user, an energy-use audit by Mills and his colleagues found that the creation, packaging, storage and movement of just 10 megabytes of data–from the making of the hardware to the running of the system that delivers it to you–requires the energy equivalent of burning 900 grams of coal.

The waste at the heart of the web: every time you search Google, a data centre stirs into life wasting heaps of energy. What can be done?(Technology). Phil McKenna.
New Scientist 192.2582 (Dec 16, 2006): p24(2).

We probably can’t all switch to water cooling for our PC fans . I would really like to see someone create a web site like a html link checker. Pop in your URL and it analyses the carbon cost (given x number of hits over time, t).