Guilt

[openspace4life]

Here I am in the vicinity of Seattle, the town that calls itself the Emerald City, the town whose mayor created the US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. I moved up here to work at Microsoft, a company that has purchased enough white Priuses to comprise most of its large campus shuttle fleet. Also, the tableware in Microsoft's 24 on-site cafeterias is made of vegetable products, designed to be composted, and there are compost bins in every break room and conference hall as well as the cafeterias themselves. It has its own private bus service, supports an on-campus bicycle maintenance event . . . I could go on. Whether any of this resulted from employees acting in their role as stockholders, rather than just leaving large numbers of identical comments in a suggestion box somewhere, I don't know--but it all seems very hopeful, especially when compared with the execrable environmental records of so many other massively powerful corporations.

But here I am, making a ten-mile commute every day from temporary housing on Mercer Island, alone in a rented SUV. To be fair to myself, I asked for a compact, but apparently all the Sea-Tac Avis had on hand was a Hyundai Santa Fe (amusing name for a Korean car, though no more so than the Toyota Tacoma if you think about it). But if I wanted to, I could take two buses and little more than an hour each way--yet I can't make myself accept the inconvenience. It's sad, really.

I'll be returning the vehicle next Monday or Tuesday, then riding back from the airport to my new apartment on a couple of express buses, and probably going back to my previous habit of biking to work, this time from a full two miles away instead of one and a bit. So all told, that's maybe three and a half weeks of being environmentally irresponsible (and probably over $100 of gasoline, which may not be expensable under the otherwise generous Microsoft relocation package). But I'll probably still buy some extra carbon credits this month, just to make me feel a little better about it.

Comments

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

Ya know - your work at Microsoft could also be helping the environment.

Consider that, absent 'modern IT as we know it', we'd still be sending tons of paper memos back and forth, using typewriters, walking around finding people, running everything on big honkin' mainframes that take more power to just print 'Hello World' than the city of Muskogee uses in a month.

Now, however, thanks to legions of people driving to work in Redmond we can commute from home, more work is done more with less power ...

My god, man. You're a saint to work at Microsoft.

Actually - what are you doing there?

[scifiben.livejournal.com]

That's certainly an interesting way to look at it. Still, the benefit is somewhat offset by the electricity and e-waste from all the giant server farms that make modern IT conveniences possible. Microsoft owns several of them, and like everyone else, we're gearing up for the future when the "cloud" of servers will have to be big enough to store everyone's data, and run all the code accessed by thin clients that are replacing current desktop apps.

As for me, I'm just working on the Windows Live Photo Gallery, a free-download rich-client app that joins a fairly basic photo touchup editor to an upload system that makes sharing your photos online a little more convenient.