Greenpeace Calls Apple’s iCloud Dirty, Unsustainable

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As Tim Cook put it at this morning’s event, Apple’s iCloud “just works” and 100 million customers love the lofty storage service.

Greenpeace, however, says Apple’s iCloud is an unsustainable coal-fueled mess and that the just-announced movie service will only make it worse.

“Apple is about innovation, but buying coal at really cheap source is not innovative,” Greenpeace senior policy analyst Gary Cook told Cult of Mac. “Those data centers [supporting iCloud] are fueled by about 60 percent coal.”

So every time you enjoy “Star Wars” (insert your favorite movie available on iTunes here) from the cloud, you are essentially “watching a movie knowing it’s destroying the Appalachians and using dirty energy,” he added.

Cloud-based storage and computing shift data to energy-intensive computer farms, or data centers, are growing at an unprecedented rate, Greenpeace noted in a statement.

The global environmental organization wants Apple to explore using renewable energy like solar or wind to power data centers. Cook says he hopes that Apple will clean up its cloud act.

“Companies like Facebook, Yahoo and Google are doing much better in terms of a cleaner grid, we hope to see Apple do the same.”

Or, it could continue to lag behind the rest of the industry by sticking with coal, “a 19th-century technology that poisons communities and the climate.”

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