  Cloud computing is revolutionizing the ICT landscape by providing scalable
and efficient computing resources on demand. The ICT industry - especially data
centers, are responsible for considerable amounts of CO2 emissions and will
very soon be faced with legislative restrictions, such as the Kyoto protocol,
defining caps at different organizational levels (country, industry branch
etc.) A lot has been done around energy efficient data centers, yet there is
very little work done in defining flexible models considering CO2. In this
paper we present a first attempt of modeling data centers in compliance with
the Kyoto protocol. We discuss a novel approach for trading credits for
emission reductions across data centers to comply with their constraints. CO2
caps can be integrated with Service Level Agreements and juxtaposed to other
computing commodities (e.g. computational power, storage), setting a foundation
for implementing next-generation schedulers and pricing models that support
Kyoto-compliant CO2 trading schemes.
