Most discussions about sustainability within the digital infrastructure industry focus on renewable energy and the price of it. Prices per kilowatt hour rule the day eternally, even as the operators of data centers and related business are increasingly concerned with using solar, wind, hydro, and other forms of renewable energy to feed their massive beasts.

But that single-focus approach to sustainability is very much like the blind men examining and elephant. We have the elephant by the tail and think it looks like a rope. But there is a heck of a lot more elephant than that in the room.

Bruce Taylor added some vision to this topic during a webinar this past week, entitled “The Sustainability Realm.” Bruce is the Senior Fellow for Sustainability at The Digital Economist – a view of his work on creating a Seven-Layer Model for Sustainability is provided in one of the Links of the Week below.

Human beings have now dumped more than 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere exceeded the consensus tipping point a few decades ago.

The United States has emitted 25 percent of these emissions cumulatively and China 13 percent – year-to-year, China now produces 26 percent of the world's emissions and the US 13 percent. Every country emits something, and the US is actually well above the world as a whole in its efficiency in delivering value from its economy relative to the emissions it creates, while China is well below the world average in this respect.

But, getting away from all the statistics and fun facts, Bruce points out there should be a strong bias for action, by governments, industrial enterprises, as well as all other businesses and organizations. He discussed building materials, incremental and quantum improvements through operational and developmental practices, and the need to migrate toward a “circular economy” that reuses rather than simply extracts, and “doughnut economies” that consider planetary limits on the outside of the doughnut and human needs as we move toward its center.

Very few adults in this conversation today will be around in the year 2100, but our children and grandchildren will. The Earth will continue to orbit as it does today, the sun will continue to fuse hydrogen, and the essentially timeless nature of the universe will rock on. That is, even as we can read alarming opinions about going past points of no return, how this and that must be done by 2050 and this and that must be done by 2100, the reality is that year is coming in any case.

So, “don't give up” is a highly abstracted way of what Bruce outlines, describes, and urges us to pursue. In fact, he makes the case that there is considerable economic value in doing so. He can cite a report from McKinsey, an organization that is hardly anti-capitalist, saying an investment on the order of $40 trillion will be needed as soon as 2030 to get us on a proper course. This is actually only about 6 to 7 percent of the global economy – consider it an investment, and a relatively small one to put at risk. The elephant is trumpeting for attention.