James West

Climate Desk Producer

James West is a producer for the Climate Desk. He wrote Beijing Blur (Penguin 2008), an intimate yet far-reaching account of modernizing China’s underground youth scene. After completing a masters in journalism at New York University in 2007, James returned to Australia where he worked as the executive producer of the national affairs program Hack. He has produced a variety of Australian television and radio programs, including the debate show Insight on SBS TV.

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Occupy May Day: Union Square Is "A Serious Mosh Pit" Right Now

—By James West

| Tue May. 1, 2012 2:17 PM PDT

As New York's weather turned into a classic spring afternoon, groups are converging on Union Square from all parts of the city ahead of a march to Wall Street at 5:30 PM. The park is packed with families, students and demonstrators in colorful costumes. Police helicopters buzz overhead, monitoring the crowd. Strong showing of pro-labor and immigrant support groups advocating immigrant rights and reform.

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Occupy May Day: Pictures From Williamsburg Bridge

—By James West

| Tue May. 1, 2012 12:01 PM PDT

On a rainy May Day morning, at least 200 people marched from Brooklyn to Manhattan across the Williamsburg Bridge, and were met by around 100 police in varying degrees of riot uniform. The crowd was mostly local and largely peaceful. There were four arrests reported. Police confiscated a shopping cart filled with riots shields fashioned from traffic barriers. Nearly every MTA train that passed the protest honked loudly in support. Before continuing to follow the crowd, James West compiled this short photo essay.

Apple, Google, Facebook: Whose Data Centers Are the Dirtiest?

Apple's iCloud is at the vanguard of personal computing. It also relies on a lot of dirty energy.

—By Tim McDonnell and James West

| Tue Apr. 17, 2012 7:00 AM PDT

Climate Desk You've heard about the Foxconn factory in China where your iPad is assembled. But have you ever considered the energy required to store your emails, photos, and videos in the cloud? As worldwide demand for data storage skyrockets, so do the power needs of the servers where all our digital archives live. While some companies (like Facebook) have made great progress in ditching dirty fossil-fuel energy for cleaner renewables, a few internet giants lag far behind. Climate Desk visited Maiden, North Carolina, for a close-up view of what will soon be one of the world's biggest data centers—owned by Apple and powered by the coal-heavy power behemoth Duke Energy.

UPDATE: A spokeswoman for Apple pushed back in a statement to Climate Desk after publication that the Maiden facility will be the "greenest data center ever built," and released figures that dispute Greenpeace's report. Greenpeace's report estimates the facility will draw 100 megawatts of power. Apple says the facility will use 20 megawatts at full capacity, and is on track to supply more than 60 percent of that power on-site from renewable sources including a solar farm and fuel cell installation, "which will each be the largest of their kind in the country." Suzanne Goldenberg from Climate Desk partner site The Guardian, quotes Greenpeace's Gary Cook as remaining skeptical about Apple's internal numbers: "I do feel that's a bit of a lowball number. That would be a very empty building they are putting there in terms of power demand if it's only 20MW. That seems disproportionally small," he said.

Apple's new data center is only one of many coal-fueled server farms across the country. The map below shows 52 of the largest, owned by companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Twitter. Mouse over a point on the map to see who owns the plant, and how reliant on coal it is, according to Greenpeace estimates. (Some data centers are clustered close together; zoom in on a particular area to see each one in more detail.)

See a full-screen version here.

The figures in the map are for individual data centers. To give you a better sense of the big picture, here's an overview of how much of each company's overall energy comes from coal, according to Greenpeace estimates:

1. Apple: 55.1 percent
2. HP: 49.7 percent
3. IBM: 49.5 percent
4. Oracle: 48.7 percent
5. Facebook: 39.4 percent
6. Microsoft 39.3 percent
7. Twitter: 35.6 percent
8. Amazon: 33.9 percent
9. Rackspace: 31.6 percent
10. Google: 28.7 percent
12. Dell: 20.1 percent

To see how other tech giants stack up against Apple, look through the Greenpeace report here.
To read about companies' energy use, check out this table from Greenpeace's report here.
Learn more about how Apple powers its facilities in its 2012 Facilities Report.
Learn more about Duke's renewables development, emissions reductions, and more in its 2011 report.
Check out these sweet aerial photos of the iDataCenter from Climate Desk partner Wired.

Stopping Climate Change Is Much Cheaper Than You Think

A UK report confirms the cost of preventing climate change would cost the average citizen just pennies a day.

—By James West

| Thu Apr. 5, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

CarbonQuilt/Flickr

You've heard it before: Politicians say they'd love to take action against climate change, but they're reeling from the sticker shock. Today, a new report from the United Kingdom's leading climate change watchdog refutes the oft-cited argument that climate action will herald economic Armageddon.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) report, with the hairy-sounding title "Statutory Advice on Inclusion of International Aviation and Shipping," says that in 2050, the UK's emissions reductions across the whole economy will cost 1 to 2 percent of the total GDP. This updates, in greater detail, the range predicted half a decade ago by the watershed Stern Review.

Just how much is that? For a rough comparison, 1 percent of the UK's 2011 GDP is a little more than what the country currently spends on public housing and community amenities and is no where near the big-ticket public spending items like health care.

The United Kingdom has enshrined in law an emissions reduction of 80 percent on 1990 levels by 2050.

"It's a very compelling economic case to act," says David Kennedy, CEO of the CCC, an independent statutory body charged with advising parliament on all things climate. "You don't need radical behavior and lifestyle change to achieve our climate objectives."

"It's a very, very small impact on growth. And what you get for that is a whole range of economic benefits."

This table from the report details the cost in 2050 of meeting emissions reductions in a few different scenarios, including if fuel prices are high or low:

The Committee on Climate Change (UK)