In getting to where it is today, Facebook has been attacked by many, from the Winklevi to its own former CFO. But, for the last one year, it has been battling Greenpeace, the environmental watchdog.

The global green NGO has taken Facebook to task as the engineering powering the social networking site uses thermal power of coal-origin. In April, a record 70,000 comments hit Facebook after an intensified campaign by Greenpeace on its “Unfriend Coal” page in just one day. The message of the Greenpeace campaign is ‘unfriend Coal, and choose renewable energy. We want Facebook to go green!’

As a business does it not have responsibilities to the environment? Or as Greepeace asks, why the world's largest social networking site acting as if its is free from social responsibilties?

Greenpeace says Facebook should be championing the cause of clean energy consumption. But it is not. The social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are catalysts for several revolutions and supporting numerous causes around the world but why are they letting down the environment themselves? Let's call this Facebook paradox.

Greenpeace's biggest peeve is that Facebook has been using 'dirty' fuel sources to power its new data center at Oregon, US. PacifiCorp, a power company that generates most of the electricity Facebook uses, works its numerous coal-fired power stations to do it. Greenpeace has demanded that Facebook maintain data using renewable energy, not coal. The ‘dirty data’ maintained by social network sites gobble up huge amount of electricity to maintain spread. At seven years of age, Facebook has more than 600 million members.

According to the Unites States Environmental Protection Agency estimates from 2006, "data centres consumed about 1.5 percent of the total electricity used in the US at a cost of $4.5 billion annually. It further adds that they are the engine behind “the cloud” - the vast computing networks that store banking and health records and run search operations.

Greenpeace’s global campaign, according to its ‘Unfriend Coal' page, is gaining ground worldwide - from Africa to Ireland, India to Sweden. The green NGO is, however, chafed that inspite of such a clarion call from its own users FB refuses to switch from 'dirty electricity' to clean energy.

According to Greenpeace, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are cleaner than FB and Twitter. An Greenpeace study from April says all three companies are now in the ‘Green Companies’ category and using hydroelectric power. So, with industry peers to emulate, why is FB not going green?

"55 percent of Facebook’s power comes from coal whereas its rival Google exploits coal for only 34 percent power, for Yahoo, the figure is even lower; 12.7 percent," the study notes.

Greenpeace has also come down on micro-blogging site – Twitter. “Twitter relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah, in March 2011, which meant an electric utility mix that is 97 percent fossil fuel-based (81 percent coal),” a website said.

However, the international environmental watchdog’s relentless campaign has bore some fruit. Last week, Facebook responded to Greenpeace, saying the company would do more in the future for the carbon impact of the energy of its data centers. It also promised to consider the ‘carbon impact’ in future. Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations, wrote in a letter to Greenpeace last month, “As we grow and mature, we will continue to invest in operational efficiency and make efficiency technology available to others.”

But whatever be Facebook’s response, it was very little and came too late.

The revolution in Egypt changed the government in just 18 days where the social media played an important role. But even with campaigning, Greenpeace took a year to get FB to respond on its clean ernergy plans. Isn’t it an irony?