Greenpeace campaign takes aim at Facebook’s coal–fired servers [animated video].

Following the recent social media driven success of Greenpeace’s campaign to get Nestlé to stop using palm oil linked to the destruction of rainforests, it seems the activist organisation is now taking aim at Facebook’s massive new data center. Apparently, the new facility is not powered by clean energy.

Greenpeace wants Facebook to “drop coal and commit to 100 percent renewable energy, cutting its carbon footprint and helping in the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change”

Greenpeace has released the embedded animated video, which is a bit of a spoof on the new feature film The Social Network – another movie Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will not be particularly happy about.

Earlier this month, Facebook responded (in the comments section) to a Greenpeace open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, maintaining that their massive, new Oregon data center is quite energy efficient, although not run on renewable energy.

Perhaps Greenpeace feels Facebook is a good target for this kind of campaign as it’s getting pretty huge, with over 500 million users now. In addition, Facebook is increasingly in competition with the likes of Google, which is doing substantially more to address its carbon footprint, and even making investments in renewable energy technology.

What are your thoughts on what Greenpeace is asking Facebook to do? Could Facebook be doing more, given its huge size and growing revenue? In any case, It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how this one turns out.

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  • Kudelka

    I'm all for stopping global warming, but if I was Mark Zuckerberg, I'd be building a special power plant that ran on whale oil after that ad. Putting someone on the spot like that is hardly the best way of making friends. What ever happened to asking nicely first?

  • http://www.jjprojects.com jjprojects

    Greenpeace is pretty unapologetic over it's confrontational approach, always has been. It's certainly not an approach I'm keen on myself, in terms of getting companies to change, but I have to admit, sometimes it gets results. I think sometimes it alienates people in the process too though.

  • http://twitter.com/dennisspring Dennis Spring

    When you run a business as large as Facebook, you don't have to be asked *nicely* to do the right thing – it's your responsibility. I don't think there is anything wrong with being called out like this, if Facebook responds well to this campaign it will actually generate a whole lot of good will for the company, despite the initial embarrassment.

  • http://www.jjprojects.com jjprojects

    Yes, I agree on that one. If they actively change and move to change here, they'll end up looking pretty good, and end up with a pretty progressive carbon policy.

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