Carbon Neutral Paper, Green Data Centers and Our Privacy on the “Green” Internet

The New York Times reports that the Rolling Stone - in a quest to be ever more friendly to the environment - has begun printing their magazine on “carbon neutral paper.“

Rolling Stone will be printed on what it calls “carbon neutral paper,” because it is made through a process that the magazine claims adds no carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The paper, which is considerably thinner than what Rolling Stone uses now, is made by a Canadian mill, Catalyst Paper, that the magazine says has reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 82 percent since 2005 and been cited by the World Wildlife Fund for its conservation efforts.

The only problem, the “carbon neutral paper” has no recycled content (not to mention the fact that the paper is made out of carbon dioxide eating trees). Meanwhile, the BBC reports another threat to our fragile environment - computers.

Computers and other IT equipment have been blamed for causing as much global warming as the airline industry.

The taskforce will oversee the piloting of a “green PC” service in which individual machines use 98% less energy than standard PCs.

IT equipment is thought to generate 35m tonnes of harmful CO2 gas each year.

The taskforce’s solution? Outsourcing of your daily computing power to “green friendly” data centres rather than individual “carbon spewing” computers. No word on whether these “green friendly” super computers will guard our personal information any better than everyone’s favorite search engine, Google.

Google Inc. (GOOG)’s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet’s top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.” [Via DrudgeReport]