- John W. DeSpirito - CEO, iSafeTECH

Go Green…What does this mean for business, personal life and our future?

In the past years of my X Generation, I have been stressed out with financial future goals, job reliability, family and now with a daily monitoring of my worldly consumption of natural resources.  Everything from water to clothes I wear to trash, we are becoming more conscious of how humans need to be friendlier to our natural surroundings and conserve.  In our fast paced lives this could be very difficult to work in another project plan.

When I first learned about Global Warming, taught by Al Gore, I can admit I was extremely skeptical, not that Al Gore was the teacher, but that the seas would rise and the sun would fry the earth.  But as a person who loves the outdoors I have seen that people just don’t care about the environment or even their surroundings.  From clear-cutting land to build a house to finding McDonald’s bags strewn on my lawn, I am not observing humans taking an active part or any part at all to Think Green.  Maybe it is because I am getting older and looking for another outlet to express my anger and stress, but I feel it is more to the realization that I am responsible and understand that I will have to live on this earth for at least 40 more years.

There is no doubt the media is taking an active role to educate society to become responsible, conservative and clean.  We have been recycling for as long as I can remember and we are starting to see hybrid engines in use everywhere.  But still, we have a huge problem and the earth is getting hotter, whether Global Warming or a millenia cycle, we are seeing rises in global temperature.

Green IT

Businesses are always looking to save money.  Most firms are unable to layoff their workforce or reduce overhead expenses being directly related to production costs or providing a service.  Green technology will be an investment to reduce costs over-time.  We have seen high efficient appliances from laundry machines to furnaces.  The cost over-time offers the consumer confidence to purchase newer and more efficient technology in the future.

Technology, as we are beginning to see, is becoming more efficient from reduced power usage to controlling levels of heat exchange.  Datacenter technicians are working hard to find solutions to reduce cooling costs by combining many servers into one and desiging innovative ideas to improve air circulation from using simple fan cooling.

One major issue that comes to mind for me, is power consumption.  As we demand more, the cost of Kwh goes higher and as the cost rises we begin to look for cheaper power alternatives from nuclear, solar or wind.  We are now seeing green hard drives, green power supplies and green monitors.  We are beginning to see a bandwagon of marketing that is consuming our souls to become green, green, green.

Will green technology trickle up to the unfiltered factory smokestacks in China or the hundreds of thousands of deisel machines in use around the world or the millions of acres of buried landfills.  As the image above depicts, will we need to pollute the moon to keep our planet clean.

Critically speaking though, green technology will be a continuing pressure to change our way of thinking, to change our way of living and to improve the world we live.  To start now, we may change the future of our planet or maybe we will just move to Mars.