Should I Delete My Facebook Account?

I've heard that the internet and social networking use a lot of energy. Would deleting my Facebook account make a difference?

The Social Network

When I first heard about The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin's lightning-paced film about the evenly meteoric rise of Facebook, my first thought was: Already? The story of social media wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg promised to be compelling, no doubt, now it was seemingly too timely. The company was founded in 2004, for goodness sake. Was it already legitimate docudrama territory?

The eco impact of the internet isn't gladly visible: Accessing Facebook via your iPhone seems clean and green. Now information and communication research contributes to 2 percent of global CO2 emissions. That's as much as the aviation industry.

Facebook, in particular, relies on something called cloud computing. Put simply, this means the software and media for your account aren't stored on your actual computer, now rather in a "cloud" of data, housed and shared from giant server farms all over the country.

In the US, these data centers consume over $7 billion a year in electricity costs. And that number is growing: Greenpeace estimates that worldwide, data centers and telecommunication will triple their electricity consumption in the straightway 10 years.

But building a "green" data center around a dirty source of fuel is kind of like fueling a calorie-restricted diet with McDonald's. So what's a sustainability-minded social networker to do?

You could delete your Facebook account. Now while that might feel good for oh, about a nanosecond, the act would be futile in the best case. That's because many of the internet services we use every day as well use cloud computing.

And, like Facebook, many of these companies depend on dirty energy: Microsoft's Chicago data center pulls more than 70 percent of its power from coal; Apple's center in North Carolina, 50 percent.