Economic growth vs sustainability , 2.0 bites back

Just came across a some very intersting articles that abond in the same way of some of my recents posts:

"..shows that economic growth and carbon emissions are inextricably linked"

"The cold, hard truth is that an ample supply of energy is necessary to grow any business over the long-term, and the storage industry is shying away from the harsh reality that a sufficient amount of energy is, unfortunately, not available to keep the industry growing."

I will try to clarify something in the next post; I’m not against energy efficiency, virtualization or other technology. I think they are actually quite useful and even fantastic in certain case; however I don't like the way they are currently used as tools for green washing. They have a positive impact on environment but are hiding the real issue and allow scores of companies to pretend to make an effort while their real goal is to make an additional buck.

So as a conclusion I will try to get a little bit less emotional about it and try to stick to hard fact and numbers.

Continuing with the transportation allegory

Virtualization provides cheap and accessible servers for everybody (think cloud / utility computing). Cheap and affordable often rhyme with non-sustainable.
Lets have a look at the Nano car from Tata. While its praise for bringing cheap cars to the mass, it also has been hailed as a potential environmental disaster.

Is virtualization the pendant of the Tata car ?

Since most company consider their energy consumtion data as trade secret its hard to evaluate its impact . With cars you can just measure air pollution (or the respiratory death rate ).