Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
funded Fair Labor Association set up by Bill Clinton in 1999 to monitor workplace
environments globally (Apple, 2012; James and Satariano, 2012). This has led Cary
Krosinsky (2012), Senior Vice President of the environmental data company TruCost,
to speculate whether, given Apple's record in innovation, its recent transparency,
improvement in the labour practices of its Chinese subsidiaries, and its potential to
further scale up sustainable change, the company is becoming a model sustainable
company.
However, there are also other issues to consider when reading corporate
communications and perhaps overly sympathetic interpretations. As Greenpeace
noted in their report
How Green is Your Cloud?
(Greenpeace, 2012), Apple's huge
$1 billion data centre in North Carolina, one of the world's largest, draws only
10 per cent of its energy from onsite renewables with the rest coming from the local
grid, which is predominantly based on coal supplemented by nuclear. This led the
NGO to remark:
Apple has been incredibly selective about the energy related details of its iCloud
in North Carolina, offering those nuggets of detail and data that it feels are
most favorable, such as the size or scale of onsite renewable energy investment,
but refusing to disclose the size of the energy demand of the facility itself, or
the environmental footprint associated with the iCloud.
(Greenpeace, 2012: 38)
Additionally, as the Green Computing Report stated in its report on Google:
The 9 percent drop reflects the 2012 decision to include power purchase agree-
ment (PPA) deductions. If PPA deductions are omitted (as they were in 2011),
the total gross emissions for 2012 add up to 2,024,444 metric tons.
(Trader, 2013)
The report also noted that Google had hosted a fund-raising dinner for the climate
change denier Republican Senator James Inhofe and contributed '$50,000 for a
fundraising dinner for the ultra-conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, which
attempts to discredit climate change scientists by suing them for fraud'.
Summary
All economic development and the pursuit of economic well-being requires a healthy
environment with fully functioning ecosystem services that enable us to produce, to
consume and to breathe. The idea that the planet's ecosystems provide human beings
with services is one clearly derived from an economistic perspective, but then
sustainable development emerged through the desire to reconcile economic processes
with ecological ones. For an increasing number of economists and ecologists, this
involves questioning and indeed overturning the ideological dominance of continuing
economic growth. There are, it is argued, ecological limits to growth and this has
led to a range of theoretical and practical explorations of what a green economy
would involve. Eco-efficiency is one aspect of that exploration, but there have also
been calls for more radical systemic transformations that would see the end of
capitalism as we know it. This has led to discussions around degrowth, sustainable
