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Greenpeace wants you to know<\/a> it’s not “picking on Apple” or “dissing the iPad” by riding their attention wave (the iPad goes on sale this Saturday). In fact, last month it set its sights on Facebook<\/a>, which plans to open an Oregon data center powered mostly by coal plants.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the new campaign distorts the big picture, as Worldchanging’s Alex Steffen notes<\/a>: “Sounds scary, right? Except when you actually look up the numbers. Computing accounts for a bit less than 3% of U.S. energy usage, according to<\/a> Lawrence Livermore Labs. The global IT industry as a whole generates<\/a> about 2% of global CO2 emissions.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Steffen suggests a better if less trendy focus: “Cars, on the other hand, which the vast majority of the people Greenpeace is trying to target also own, are the single largest contributor to climate change<\/a>, according to NASA, exceeding all other sources in their impacts, and exceeding computing’s global impacts by more than a factor of ten<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There’s a man-bites-dog appeal to exposing the “dirty” impact of high-tech computing, like the media coverage<\/a> last year claiming that a Google search requires much energy as boiling a tea kettle. Such stories usually overlook telecommuting, online shopping, and the bazillion other ways the web allows users to bypass fuel-burning activities. These technologies bring far more promise than peril for engineering sustainable societies. Except for robot journalists<\/a>—those are nothing but peril.<\/p>\n Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n Senate climate bill to fund Utah tar sands development<\/a><\/p>\n What to make of the Pollan\/Schlosser agreement with Wendy’s?<\/a><\/p>\n Scrounging for a green angle to the Large Hadron Collider experiment<\/a><\/p>\n