Big cloud on the horizon
ARE YOU doing your best to save the planet? Splendid. Me too. Between you and me, my motives are a little selfish, as the planet I’ve decided to save is Earth, on which I happen to live, but I still like to think my modest efforts are in everyone’s interests.
Blooming hard work, though, isn’t it? Just when we’ve convinced ourselves we’re doing something good, some miserabilist pops up and tells us it’s not enough.
Often they’ll tell us that the good thing we thought we were doing is actually, according to some entirely impartial new research they’ve funded, really bad.The likes of you and me, we’ll be told, are part of the problem, not the solution, unless we snap ourselves out of our complacency and start doing things that offer hope to humankind, such as Pritt-sticking ourselves to a slip road or chucking minestrone at a Monet.
Which brings me neatly on to the cloud.You’re familiar with this, I take it? Not to be confused with clouds of the conventional kind – the ones at which, like Joni Mitchell, I’ve looked at “from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow,” etc. – but the internetty cloud where much of our stuff is now remotely stored.
It’s extraordinary to think how much waste we’ve avoided thanks to this wonder of technology.
Think of those squillions of documents, for example, that we’d once have printed out – assuming we could get the blinking printer to work – which would have consumed a forest of paper and an ocean of ink.Think of all those photos we’ve taken, sitting up there in the ether, instantly accessible when we need them but rarely needing to exist now in their physical form.
Think of the bulky books we can now e-read instead, and the films and music we merely have to stream, rather than buy on disc, packaged in those evil plastic cases.
The cloud eliminates the need for so much waste, it’s a wonder of the modern age, right?
Nope, apparently not. Tonight’s PANORAMA (BBC1, 8pm; 10.40pm in Northern Ireland) asks: “Is The Cloud Damaging The Planet?”
And, guess what? The answer it’ll give us won’t be: “Naah, it’s absolutely fine.” Heavens, no.
“The cloud depends on processing factories,” we’re now informed, “vast data centres that use enormous amounts of power and water.
“Every time someone goes online, they increase its carbon footprint.”
This, it declares, is a growing environmental problem “for which everyone is responsible.”
Yes, everyone.That’s what it says. We’re ALL to blame.
Which I guess must include the likes of Greta and Harry and Meghan.Would you like to tell them or can I?