Whether or not the risks associated with the energy costs of Stack infrastructure will outpace the efficiencies provided by calculative technologies as they become pervasive across industrial sectors is unknown, and probably unknowable at the moment. Prognostications vary from measured good news to very bad news. According to a Greenpeace report on cloud computing and climate change, the electricity consumed by cloud computing globally will increase from 632 billion kilowatt-hours (0.6 terawatts) in 2007 to 1,963 billion kilowatt-hours (1.9 terawatts) by 2020, and the associated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions would reach 1.034 megatons (currently the world economy ’ s total energy appetite is roughly 15 terawatts). If imagined as an emergent nation-state, the Cloud would be today the fifth largest consumer of electricity, ahead of India, Germany, Canada, France, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. But even this doesn ’ t fully capture the climatic and ecological impact of planetary computation.
The extraction of mineral resources to manufacture and dispose of devices and hardware can be extremely destructive in its own right. For their part, data centers are estimated to represent only 20 percent of the information computing technologies (ICT)
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