Facebook Goes Green?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekkaia/3082853134/">ecotist</a>Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Green-minded procrastinators everywhere rejoiced last week when Facebook agreed to move away from coal towards clean energy-powered data centers. The announcement came on the heels of a two-year Greenpeace campaign that mobilized a reported 700,000 supporters to exhort the company to “Unfriend Coal.” 

On the surface, this seems like great news. As internet use has exploded in recent years, it’s been accompanied by huge growth in energy consumption and carbon emissions (though it’s not quite as bad as you might expect). But details on how exactly Facebook plans to shrink its environmental footprint are hard to come by. Tzeporah Berman, co-Director of Greenpeace’s International Climate and Energy Program, told me that the coal-reduction strategy would focus on the areas where Facebook’s data centers are located, in Prineville, Oregon and Rutherford County, North Carolina, where Facebook and Greenpeace will work with local utilities to improve the data centers’ supply of clean energy. Michael Kirkland, a communications manager at Facebook, also said that a preference for clean energy sources would be a part of the company’s policy in finding sites for new data centers going forward, but wouldn’t say whether Facebook is willing to actually, you know, spend more money to achieve it, or how long it will take.

In its statement on the Greenpeace agreement Facebook also promised “ongoing research into energy efficiency,” but it didn’t go into much detail on that, either, though Kirkland did tell me that much of Facebook’s research is aimed at finding and implementing more efficient practices within the company—not necessarily at reducing the company’s overall energy consumption.

Until Facebook and Greenpeace hammer out some more specific plans, which Berman says they’ll start to do early next year, it’s hard to know how much impact Facebook’s promises will have. And actually, we probably won’t know the full story of Facebook’s energy use until after the company’s long-awaited IPO. (This lack of transparency is particularly frustrating considering how much information Facebook asks its users to pony up.) So while I’d like feel great about the time I spend staying up-to-date on the latest adventures of my high school friend’s cat, I guess I won’t rationalize away the hours I spend on Facebook as clean and green just yet.

 

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate