This Guardian article touches upon something I have been complaining about for a long time. When you ran an application on your laptop which used lots of power you felt it – the laptop gets hot and burns your trousers. When you use a cloud service that power is hidden in a data-centre somewhere else and you will never know the environmental damage caused. While cloud providers often argue their data-centres are cleaner and greener than old ones, the problem is that because of there services we are using them for new things we did not do a few years ago – like social media!

Social media explosion powered by dirty energy, report warns | Environment | theguardian.com.