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Is the NYT Data Center Story in a Time Warp? Top 5 Stories This Week

Watch the plants! There are limits to their growth, and ours. Also: data center showdown, cargo bikes, and satellite photos of economic injustice.

A coal industry "documentary" from the early '90s painted a lush picture of plant life in a carbon-rich atmosphere. Empirical evidence of stunted growth is showing us just how wrong their science was.Photo Credit: Smithsonian Institution

Stop taking plants for granted

If plants love carbon dioxide, then it stands to reason that more CO2 should turn into more happy, healthy plants, right? Well, apparently not. Botanists are compiling increasing evidence that elevated CO2 can actually stunt plant growth, as reported by John Collins Rudolf in the New York Times.

And it’s not just CO2. The planet can only support so much plant life (and thus human life) before it hits a “planetary boundary”—and some scientists point out that this boundary is fuzzier than we might expect. “It’s not as if we can keep doing business as usual until we hit a planetary boundary, and all hell will break loose,” says ecologist Start Pimm, quoted in the New York Times. “It’s already breaking loose now.”

Let them eat leaves

We’ve seen a lot of reports lately about the role of trees in urban health and safety, like the strong correlation between trees and lower crime rates. Here’s another interesting look at tree cover and neighborhoods—from space. Writer Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile shows some satellite photos documenting the relationship between tree cover and income inequality. “The study’s authors say the demand curve they see for tree cover is more typical of demand for luxury goods than necessities,” De Chant writes. “That’s too bad.”

Stop the press! Data centers aren’t that bad

Another New York Times article on the power-hungry Internet made a big splash this week, but people who’ve been writing about this issue for a while were pretty disappointed. Tech researcher Diego Doval was downright enraged, writing a point-by-point takedown of the article, followed by information on why data centers are such power hogs and what the industry is doing about it.

Over at GigaOm, Katie Fehrenbacher is more temperate: although she complains that it “sound[s] like the author…jumped into a time machine and did his reporting a couple years ago” and is “lumping together” small-scale IT outfits with the “webscale cloud giants,” she still sees “a lot more work to be done when it comes to the Internet and its massive power consumption.”

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Cargo bikes could replace delivery trucks

All this talk about data centers makes it easy to forget a lot of old and unsolved problems, like the pollution and traffic problems caused by delivery of goods and services.

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Kris De Decker at Low Tech Magazine looks at the amazing possibilities for doing many of these deliveries by bicycle.

This reminded me of the Pedal People in Northampton, Massachusetts; they pick up trash and compost, deliver your farm share, and many other services—all by bike. If people can do it in New England winters, they can do it anywhere!

Rent-to-own LED lighting?

Even though we all know LEDs will save us money, you need lots of upfront capital to upgrade. A company called Digital Lumens is trying to change that, according to Ucilia Wang at GigaOM. It’s not really “rent-to-own,” more analogous to a power purchase agreement, Wang explains: Digital Lumens will install the lighting—along with its lighting management software, which it claims makes all the difference to the savings—and then charge fees for software services over a 15- to 20-year period.

Right now they’re working mainly in manufacturing facilities, but the company is hoping to expand to commercial buildings as well. All very intriguing, and we’ll be watching for more details.

Published September 28, 2012

(2012, September 28). Is the NYT Data Center Story in a Time Warp? Top 5 Stories This Week. Retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/blog/nyt-data-center-story-time-warp-top-5-stories-week

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