Day 31: Microsoft, Time to Kick The Coal - Learn from Facebook

A couple years ago, the Facebook group "Unfriend Coal" appeared. 20 months later, Facebook announced a goal to run on renewable energy. That's huge...Facebook uses more electricity than some small countries.

Facebook even purportedly asked Google for help with designing more energy efficient servers (yay! I love it when our Internet overlords collaborate for good causes).

Greenpeace has a timeline on how they made it happen (actually, how we made it happen ... campaigns are only as successful as people like us supporting)

Here's the video they used to launch the campaign:

Despite former CEO Bill Gate's extreme love for philanthropy, Microsoft isn't doing too well yet in this regard.

The Letter (from this petition) speaks for itself

Dear Microsoft CEO Mr. Ballmer,

The coal-fired power plants that energize your giant data centers are one of the world’s top sources of airborne carcinogens and greenhouse gases.

You’ve probably seen the Greenpeace International report confirming just how much coal is being burned to keep all those servers online. It casts quite a cloud over all that IT innovation, but the facts are easy to see: Our data is downright dirty.

But you have an opportunity to clear things up, leading us toward the realization of IT that is powered by the sun and the wind, not dirty coal. Here’s what you can do to make it happen:

 - Make it company policy to seek renewable energy when siting your data centres.
 - Urge your electricity suppliers to move away from dirty energy
generation, investing instead in renewable energy generation, capacity, and efficiency.
- Advocate full transparency of your energy use and carbon footprint for all products, as well as your cloud presence.
- Encourage your product suppliers and manufacturers to adopt similar policies, and give preferences to green suppliers

As an environmentally aware digital citizen, I'm asking you to help us all breathe a little easier by working with Greenpeace to create a world where data centres powered by dirty coal are a thing of the past. Along with being the source of so many IT breakthroughs, you'll literally give us all a breath of fresh air.

Respectfully,

Sent to

Source

Email:  steveb@microsoft.com
Phone: (425) 706-8448
(Emailed this one as it was taking too much time finding the mailing address)