Greenpeace Facebook Campaign Results in Renewable Energy Collaboration Agreement

Greenpeace International’s nearly 1 million-strong Facebook community have brought about a fundamental shift in business operations and strategy at the world’s largest and most popular social media network company.

Led by the world’s highest profile organization of environmental activists, hundreds of thousands of Greenpeace’s Facebook followers since February have been urging Facebook to go ‘green’ – not only in terms of its own operations, but in terms of using its social media platform as a platform for fostering political and social change.

The response has included a massive “Unfriend Coal” campaign and Web page, “photo protests, music videos, petitions and events at Facebook offices from Dublin to Palo Alto,” as well as “a Guinness World Record for the most comments on a Facebook post, Greenpeace reports in a news release.

Responding to this mass action, Facebook management has responded by agreeing to work with Greenpeace “to promote clean energy, encourage major utilities to develop renewable energy generation, and develop programs that will enable Facebook users to save energy and engage their communities in clean energy decisions,” writes Greenpeace’s Eoin Dubsky in an email

Data centers run by major IT companies consume some 2% of US electricity, and that amount’s set to triple with ongoing growth in cloud computing, Greenpeace notes. “To cut their carbon footprint, power hungry IT companies like Apple, Microsoft and Twitter need to follow Facebook’s lead and drive a green energy revolution in the industry,” Dubsky writes.

Here’s a link to a digital copy of the Facebook-Greenpeace Renewable Energy Collaboration agreement.