“[B]uilding an internet that runs on renewable sources of energy…”

If you wanted to, you could supply your entire life shopping on the web without using even one gallon of gas in your car. You could go on any search engine right now and secure a house, car, Bible, medicine, fine work of art, pet, information, chemical formula, book, water, musical instrument, movie, vacation,  groceries, car parts, phones, clothes–practically anything–on the web. 

It’s nearly impossible to calculate how many millions of productive hours have been saved because of shopping on the internet (although you might find that on the web, too). Hours spent in your car or on transit have been saved because instead of heading to a store you let your fingers do the driving or walking. Millions or billions of gallons of gas haven’t been burned and therefore have been saved because you didn’t hop in your car and go to the store!

You’d think the enviros would be doing back flips over this! Ah, success! But except for Al Gore “inventing” the internet (yes, he said it), the greens have had little to do with all the savings from this miraculous time saving invention. And that’s no fun unless you’re the one dictating terms.  If you want to be on the greens’ good side, you’d better strive for their latest made-up goal. Or else. 

The group with the word peace in their name has declared war on tech companies for using too many fossil fuels to power their servers. The enviros have now thrown down: do it our way or we’ll issue a “report” and ruin you.

The report has been now been issued. Late last week Clicking Green: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet was released. Amazon Web Services and Twitter were given bad grades for tsk, tsk, using too many fossil fuels to run their servers. Or at least that’s would they like you to believe. In fact, Amazon was given the grade of F* for not kissing the ring of the green mafia,

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the infrastructure for a significant part of the internet, remains among the dirtiest and least transparent companies in the sector, far behind its major competitors, with zero reporting of its energy or environmental footprint to any source or stakeholder. [emphasis mine]

Translation: Amazon didn’t bend over for a wallet biopsy so Greenpeace is greenmailing them.

Worse, Greenpeace actually accuses Amazon of –wait for it–saving money. Shaking its balled fist of righteousness toward the heavens, Greenpeace looks upward to The Cloud and demands an answer of the Goddess Gaia: ‘Why? Why?‘

Those companies, most notably Amazon Web Services, are choosing how to power their infrastructure based solely on lowest electricity prices, without consideration to the impact their growing electricity footprints have on human health or the environment. [emphasis mine]

Amazon has shopped for energy based on low prices. It won’t be long before enviros label Amazon the online analog of –gasp!–Walmart (see Satan). For the moment they’ll settle for calling Amazon dirty,

Other internet companies have refused to pay even lip  service to sustainability, and are simply buying dirty energy straight from the grid.

Greenpeace really does want the internet run by the weather: wind and sun. They’ve even let water out of the doghouse, now calling it a clean energy! This will come as a grand surprise to Northwest enviros who have Lumi sticked politicos who dare call hydro-power sustainable. Environmentalists, and the politicians who pant at their sides (see Democrats), contend because water runs through turbines and sometimes kill salmon (see green religious iconography including St. Salmon) it’s not really ‘green’ or sustainable. But now Greenpeace proclaims rain is now sustainable in the Pacific Northwest. This is really going to screw up their heads.

All of this sustainability talk is to stop Man Made Global Warming now known as Climate Change –the name change being required to hide their botched predictions about the end of the world that Global Cooling has caused,

We witness on a daily basis evidence that the foundation of our offline world, our planet, is out of balance as a result of climate change and other threats caused by our reliance on dirty sources of energy. 

Amazon isn’t sufficiently listening to the Global Warmists and, as a result, Greenpeace calls them bitter clingers,

The scientific community is issuing warnings, increasingly dire in nature, that our continued reliance on the energy technologies of the past is putting our future in grave danger. We need to shift at internet-like speed to a world powered by renewable sources of energy, disrupting the status quo to which electric utilities and other fossil fuel providers are desperately clinging. 

In its report, Greenpeace touts companies that have said they’ll someday run 100% of their servers on wind and solar power. Look for higher prices from Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace and Salesforce. Those companies have paid their green indulgences and now have been absolved of their possible sins against the climate. For now.

You may be wondering where fracking enters the fray. It doesn’t. Greenpeace measures the cost of every fossil fuel in terms of taking away investment in their beloved solar and wind technologies and demands the web giants not “frack the internet.”

While the increasing supply of natural gas due to fracking has helped to shut down a number of coal plants, shale gas [fracking] also diverts investment away from renewable energy. The GHG footprint of shale gas may be significantly greater than for conventional gas, with some life-cycle analyses showing shale gas to have a GHG  footprint that is higher than even coal, due to fugitive methane emissions that are leaked during gas extraction and transportation. [emphasis mine]

Fugitive emissions? File those under dirty energy, clingers, Walmart and now Amazon. Greenpeace has declared war.