the next great wave of green

I was debating with a group of friends over the weekend on what the next greening industry will be. The current one, we agreed, is architecture and development: for developers, new urbanism is the latest thing, and for architectures, LEED is hot. (Or, as the case may be, cool.) But--despite the growing popularity of hybrids and CFCs--most industries don't seem to have jumped on the green bandwagon yet. So, we were wondering, what will be next?

I couldn't decide at the time, but I found my answer in the news this morning. Yahoo is joining Google in a race to be greenest, and I think that Grist's David Roberts is right: technology is the next wave of green. Technology companies have a lot more than just good press to gain by going green. There's little argument that green technology could--and should, and probably will--be the next industry boom, and there's plenty of push for developing new and greener technologies in every industry, from architecture to transportation. But there's more to it than that. The truth is that, while we need new technology, we also need to take better advantage of the technology we do have. There are hundreds of ways in which we could be saving exponential amounts of energy and resources each year just by taking full advantage of existing technology. And nowhere is that wasted effort more obvious than on the internet.

Take paper as an example. I've mentioned before the preference of ebooks over paper books from an environmental standpoint: much as I love the smell of books, at some point we have to recognize the benefit of storing and exchanging information in a way that doesn't require using up precious trees. And there are thousands of other ways we could use less paper by taking advantage of online resources. Emails have mostly replaced post mail for general communication, but in my office--and probably in yours as well--there are still hundreds of things that have to be mailed with an original signature, hundreds of records that have to be printed out and kept filed as a hard copy, hundreds of letters that have to be sent just for form's sake. And this, quite simply, ought to change. With the potential to back up digital information on multiple servers in different locations, there's rarely a real need for information to be kept on paper. Let's the save the trees for something more important.

What's great about this is the fact that so much of the technology is already there. Most bills can be paid entirely online, without ever being mailed at all. Many books are already available as ebooks, and they're usually cheaper than their hardbound counterparts. Wikipedia has more updated information than any printed encyclopedia could hope for. Even with the internet running off a grid powered entirely by coal and gas, it's still far better for the environment than putting all the same information on paper. Not to mention that it's cheap and available to everyone, worldwide, all the time.