A pot plant for every PC and the Hanging Gardens of Google

Fellow Londonblogger James Governor masochistically challenged me to shoot down this article (as I have a reputation of being grumpy with fuzzy Greenscams), and I have rather sadistically therefore decided to praise it instead

Sez James:

I was thinking about the term business to consumer (B2C) the other day. I am not a huge fan of the term “consumer” in the digital era- we’re all content creators after all. But I just realised that my notion that we are all producers is even more true in terms of carbon footprint. Whether individuals or businesses, free agents or organisations, we are all net producers of carbon dioxide.

Aha- I thought to myself, “neat insight”, and so to twitter, where I said:

“when it comes to carbon emissions none of us are consumers. we are all producers.”

Quick as a flash Digital Signals came back and said:

“The fern on our bathroom window sill would beg to differ!”

The real insight therefore is that Business To Consumer might have an entirely different meaning this century. Businesses need to create closed loops systems with plants, the only reliable carbon consumers. Of course such an idea might sound bonkers - but why shouldn’t a polluter directly pay to halt deforestation in, say, Brazil? Lets save the planet’s lungs while we still can, before the only carbon consumers we can use are ugly crop-based monocultures.

He then challenges us all:

So what might your Sustainable Business To Consumer strategy be?

My immediate thought was that we need a call to arms personally, viz:

"A POT PLANT FOR EVERY PC"

Yup, for every PC you own, you need to offset it with a pot plant. In fact, if you put it and the PC in a little greenhosue you could have a year-round tropical climate all of your own and grow tropical fruit year all year and not jet them in (in fact, if I put my work servers together I reckon I could grow those huge South African pawpaws - 18" long and counting - all year round).

Laptop owner need to offset it by leaving a potplant at home, or maybe carry one around as a hat or something. iPhone owners can just not wash more than once a week..... (oh - they don't )

And this made me think some more - imagine the Hanging Gardens of Google - if the Google datacentre got rid of its low grade heat by being in the middle of a monster Biome like a sort of Expanded Eden Project (see photo above) so that the datacentres grew tropical fruit in the Canadian or whatever tundra and thus covered not only direct CO2 emissions but reduced air transport of pawpaws, big net win.

And it gives them an alternative revenue stream to boot. Amazon too - Dr Werner Vogels could be bouncing around the world talking about biome microclimate clouds and pawpaws, as well as system clouds. He could even hand out some pawpaw at his lectures

Now excuse me while I go and calculate what size and type of tropical fruit my PC MicroBiome has to support.....