iNet Web Blog

Do you often remark that there are a lot of natural disasters occurring lately? Does the weather seem to be changing each year? Is it a long hot summer? Maybe its a short cold dry winter. In 2007 Australia continued to suffer from it’s worst drought and raging wildfires, yet one of it’s capital cities experienced it’s first white Christmas. Large chunks of ice from Antartica have been floating further north than normal. Hurricanes have been hitting the coast of the America’s with more intensity and more often. Torrential floods are causing towns to disappear down rivers all over the planet.

If you have noticed any of these phenomena each time you turn on your television, then welcome to Global Warming.

Put simply, greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming. Global warming occurs when there is a build up of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The gases trap the heat from the sun, much like a locked car on a hot day, leading to an increase in the earth’s temperature. Just a one-degree rise in the Earth’s temperature can have a major impact upon life on this planet.

So what has the environment got to do with the World Wide Web?

A major contributor to the level of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere is the business sector. However, we’re unable to operate our businesses without electricity. Data Centers and businesses with heavy IT infrastructures use copious amounts of “non” renewable energy which produce expotential amounts of harmful greenhouse gases.

So if we are one of the world worst contributors to the problem, how can we contribute to the solution? By reducing the need for natural resources.

Equipment

Hardware manufacturers are honing their developments towards components that require less power, and energy ratings can be found on a lot of hardware. Therefore, purchasing components with a good energy rating is definately a good step forward. The less power required, the less you will need.

Green Power (renewable energy)

Invest in better operations that will nullify it’s contribution to Global Warming, and our impact on the environment. Begin this journey by choosing green energy to power your business premises & residences! Run your infrastructure on Green Power, which is an energy generated from renewable sources with minimal impact on the environment. These are sources that cannot be depleted or can be replaced, such as solar and wind. Generating renewable energy produces no greenhouse gas and therefore has minimal impact and contributes to a healthier environment.

Renewable energy is power generated from sources such as the wind, water (hydro electricity), sun (solar photovoltaic), and biomass (eg landfill gas from rubbish tips, or the burning of specially grown crops). Renewable energy has much less impact on the environment than the generation of traditional fossil fuel power, such as coal or gas, as no greenhouse gases are emitted.

Business Administration

We begin this by reducing the amount of paper we consume. Unbelievably paper production has increased, even though everything is available at our finger tips, and with a wide variety of recordable media. Why is this? The most common reason seems to be government red tape! When governments are trying to get us to reduce our plight on natural resources, many countries still require businesses and individuals to keep paper trails for up to 7 years. But this has to change. Portable hard drives, thumb drives, CD’s, DVD’s, etc., are now the more preferred method of storing records.

Marketing

Make your business e-capable. And the first step to this is by registering a domain, obtaining web hosting, getting yourself a website and email addresses set up. Website’s will reduce the need for catalogues, bulky brochures and mountains of junk mail.

Badly coded websites waste resources too! The more bandwidth required, the more energy you are using. Every little bit counts. Compare the download times of your favourite websites, if one is taking 5 minutes to download they are missing the plot and either need to be advised of that or avoided.

Technology

Becoming aware of the technology & gadgets you use. Buy only waht you need, not fads. iPods, PSP’s, X Boxes, etc are great toys & gifts … however, they are a waste of resources when they sit in storage until the next clean out day. Purchasing a top end computer when all you do is blog, chat, do FaceBook, is a waste of power. Investing in the ‘next best thing’ before your last ‘next best thing’ has reached its expiry date is a waste of resources, power & money.

Being aware of technology requirements. Social networking & sharing photos has increased expotentially in the past few years. However, most aren’t aware that their camera produces a 2-3mb photo, that then gets uploaded & then downloaded. So much bandwidth & power wasted in this practice.

Transport

The need to travel to conduct business can be cut down or eleiminated. Banking and bill paying can be done from home and conducting business online will minimize waste, pollution and energy consumption. Cities can become decentralized meaning that people will not need to travel as far and pollution from cars will be reduced. The need for formal office space will diminish. Already there has been a high increase in the amount of home based businesses & working from home rather than going into the office.

Business Air travel continues to increase, though by now it should be decreases giving way to freight flights for purchases made online. Online communications and ecommerce minimize the pollution to the environment caused by unnecessary travel. Save travel for holidays, conduct business online.

Government

Governments need to subsidize businesses that are eliminating the need for natural resources. The bottom line is always important in a business, and if becoming more environmentally responsible is going to cost a business more, it is unlikely that those methods will be adopted. Our goverment representatives need to be lobbied for subsidies.

They need to be lobbied not to engage in so much international travel when they can web conference. I read somewhere that Kevin Rudd spent more time out of the country than in it during 2008. True or not, our leaders are taking liberties that they are demanding we should not. Why ratify Kyoto? We are meant to follow their lead, then they ‘should’ lead us on the ‘right’ path instead of uysing hyperbole & propaganda.