That depends on the problem.

I disagree w/ the author that storing blurry cat memes is what’s “destroying our environment.” Transportation is our biggest net polluter in terms of CO2, which is higher than all electrical generation combined. If we’re want to solve CO2 emissions, we have to solve transportation, since that’s the 500 pound gorilla in the room.

If we look specifically at datacenters, storage makes up a tiny fraction of the overall energy use. That article mentions that datacenters probably have a similar CO2 footprint as the aviation industry, which makes up about 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions, or about 10% of the total transportation emissions from the above link.

If the goal is to fix climate change, data centers are pretty far down the list in terms of priorities. Higher priorities are, roughly in this order:

1. ground transportation - electrify or switch to something like hydrogen
2. electrical power generation - this will directly reduce the impact of data centers, be part of 1, and solve a number of other issues
3. residential heating - switch from fossil fuels to heat pumps for heating, which should be a relatively “drop-in” replacement and could save customers money
4. industry - largely solved by 2, but there may need to be some shifts in certain types of production processes to reduce emissions

Changing anything about data centers is way down the list of priorities, and it’ll be largely solved by something much higher up. So it’s really the wrong target to attack.