Greenpeace members arrested in Apple 'cloud' demo

Two Greenpeace activists have been arrested after being prised from a giant iPod in front of Apple's headquarters during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centres. The protesters had locked themselves inside a 2.4-metre tall, three-metre wide survival pod previously used during demonstrations to stop oil drilling in the Arctic. Greenpeace confirmed the arrests but could not immediately confirm the charges. The activists were broadcasting recorded messages urging Apple to use clean energy instead of climate change culprit coal for electricity to power online services such as iCloud data storage, Greenpeace said. "Apple's executives have thus far ignored the hundreds of thousands of people asking them to use their influence for good by building a cloud powered by renewable energy," Greenpeace USA executive director Phil Radford said. "As Apple's customers, we love our iPhones and iPads, but we don't want to use an iCloud fuelled by the smog of dirty coal pollution." Apple rejected the Greenpeace findings as outdated or wrong, and said it was leading the pack when it came  to shifting data centres to clean energy. The company's new North Carolina data centre aims to get more than 60 per cent of its power from renewable sources including an on-site solar farm and a fuel cell installation touted as the largest of their kind in the United States. The facility will be "the greenest data centre ever built" and will be joined next year by one in Oregon, powered completely by renewable energy, Apple said. The protest began late on Monday with activists projecting pictures, Twitter messages and Facebook posts from supporters of a "Clean Our Cloud" campaign on to walls of Apple's headquarters in the California city of Cupertino. Apple employees arriving for work in the morning were greeted by four protesters wearing iPhone costumes with giant screens displaying similar messages, Greenpeace International spokesman David Pomerantz said. "The costumes are pretty hilarious, so I'm seeing a lot of smiles and laughs," Mr Pomerantz said. More than 215,000 people have reportedly signed a Clean Our Cloud petition since the campaign launched last month with the release of a report grading major technology firms on the use of renewable energy sources. Amazon, Apple and Twitter were graded poorly in a Greenpeace study of technology titans' use of clean energy to power the mushrooming internet cloud, but Facebook, Google and Yahoo! won praise. The environmental group's report, billed as a rallying cry instead of a critique, related the companies' use of data centres and other energy issues. Both Amazon and Microsoft data centres rely heavily on "dirty and dangerous coal and nuclear power", the report says. Greenpeace called on all technology firms using data centres to provide online software or services to be more open about energy use and to shift to non-polluting sources of power.