Data Center Regulation Awareness Increasing, Prepare for CO2K

This is an excerpt from a blog entry by a speaker at the 2009 Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, NV, named Michael Manos. He spoke about how Cap and Trade style legislation is already having a negative impact on the UK’s IT and data center industries. The proposals I’ve heard for regulating data centers, which the government has now declared centers of eco-terrorism due to their extreme carbon output, are startling and will inevitably result in reduced productivity, massive costs, and is all a massive waste of time, especially in light of UEA emails that have leaked about scientists manipulating core data at the center of these assumptions. People are starting to wake up to what this nonsense will entail I think:

My talk centered around the coming Carbon Cap and Trade Regulation and its specific impact on IT organizations and the data center industry.  I started my talk with a joke about how excited I was to be addressing a room of tomorrow’s eco-terrorists.  The joke went flat and the audience definitely had a fairly serious demeanor.   This was reinforced when I asked how many people in the audience thought that regulation was a real and coming concern for IT organizations.  Their response startled me.

I was surprised because nearly 85% of the audience had raised their hands.  If I contrast that to the response to the exact same question asked three months earlier at the Tier One Research Data Center Conference where only about 5% of the audience raised their hands, its clear that this is a message that is beginning to resonate, especially in the larger organizations.