Move to GNU/Linux, Save This Planet
Published yesterday:
The famous and sorely-missed George Carlin said way back in the early 90s that there was no point trying to save this planet, but this was his comedy schtick (doom and gloom celebrated). We've just mentioned what oil scarcity will cause, with a mention in passing of GNU/Linux [1, 2]. My wife thinks all those canceled flights are great news for the environment; reduction in consumption would also help the planet. Regarding what GNU/Linux stands to gain from all this, consider the first link (Vivek Gite): "According to new independent tests Red Hat Linux pulls as much as 12% less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware. It means Linux is better for reducing data center power consumption or electrical power consumption."
The famous Tom Henderson did the investigation at the time and wrote: "We ran multiple power consumption tests using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP1 on four, popular 1U server machines, one each from Dell and IBM and two from HP. The results showed that while Windows Server 2008 drew slightly less power in a few test cases when it had its maximum power saving settings turned on, it was RHEL that did the best job of keeping the power draw in check across the board."
Since then Windows has only gotten a lot more bloated (GNU/Linux distros that are lean have prevailed) and the slop in Windows totally wrecks the planet (at the remote end, too).
If you are an environmentalist, it's hard to justify still using stuff from Apple or Microsoft.