ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee Submits Recommendations on Green Deal
ACM’s Europe Technology Policy Committee submitted comments to the Directorate General for Climate Action of the European Commission in support of the comprehensive and ambitious sweep of the Commission’s Green Deal. Europe TPC 
strongly concurred with the Commission’s premise that realizing true energy efficiencies in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector will be critical to Europe’s success in meeting the Green Deal’s appropriately aggressive climate targets.
Europe TPC also urged the Commission to set specific and mandatory emissions targets and legal limitations for the ICT sector, including:
- setting a carbon tax;
- legislating specific and ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction requirements accompanied by suitable enforcement mechanisms for the ICT sector; and
- employing strategically detailed regulation grounded in the realities of the marketplace to encourage increased data centre efficiencies.
Europe TPC also cautioned against the use of any proof-of-work based distributed ledger technology, such as blockchain, for supply chain management purposes, as its exorbitant power consumption requirements are fundamentally incompatible with the goals of the Green Deal.
Featured ACM Distinguished Speaker: Michalis Vlachos
Michalis Vlachos is a Professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne. Previously he was with IBM Research. His interests are in the areas of data mining, big data and information retrieval. From 2011-2016 he was the scientific director for the ERC Starting grant on the topic “Exact Mining from In-Exact Data.” He is a frequent presenter at the ACM conferences on Knowledge Management (CIKM) and on Data Mining (SIGKDD). He has been a member of the IBM Academy of Technology since 2018.
For more information on Michalis, please visit his DSP speaker information page.
Michalis Vlachos’s Digital Library author page
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