One man's broadband Utopia is another man's environmental catastrophy

A while back I made a couple of partially tongue-in-cheek posts about environmental concerns which bring me back to earth when I get too excited about the wonderful world of web services. A few mega-uber value readers wrote in to respond that they thought it was a very significant point, particularly when we consider the potential externalities of the situation - e.g., the carbon impacts of a popular service might fall disproportionately hard on the residents of California when the user base is actually global. Now I see that the nice folks at the Cavell Group are building a practice around the issue of telecom/IT and their environmental impacts. Very interesting statistics on page 7. Now stop reading this blog and switch your computer off.