• Facebook, Greenpeace Settle Clean Energy Feud After Two-Year Campaign

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Thursday, December 15th, 2011
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    Remember when Greenpeace totally didn’t like Facebook and its use of ‘dirty energy’ in its datacenters? Well, they’re best buddies now. Greenpeace and Facebook this morning announced that they’re teaming up on the promotion of renewable energy and “develop programs that will enable Facebook users to save energy and engage their communities in clean energy decisions”.

    Facebook also committed to using clean and renewable energy to power its own operations.

    The news comes two years after the global campaigning organization launched its Unfriend Coal Campaign, enlisting online activists to call on Facebook to power its data centers with clean energy instead of coal. That campaign ends today.

    Marcy Scott Lynn, of Facebook’s sustainability programme, said it looked forward “to a day when our primary energy sources are clean and renewable” and that the company is “working with Greenpeace and others to help bring that day closer”.

    As part of the agreement between Greenpeace and Facebook, the social network behemoth committed to the pursuit of “ongoing research into energy efficiency” through the Open Compute Project, which Greenpeace will also work to support.

    Greenpeace says it is currently the most ‘liked’ environmental nonprofit organization on Facebook.


    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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