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Tzeporah Berman, Climate and Energy Co-Director of Greenpeace leads Irish Greenpeace volunteers in a protest outside Facebook's Dublin office yesterday calling on them to change the type of energy they use. Niall Carson/PA Wire/Press Association Images
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Greenpeace calls on Facebook to 'unfriend coal'

Environmental lobby group launched protest online and in person outside Facebook’s Dublin offices over the company’s use of coal-produced power.

GREENPEACE ACTIVISTS HAVE been protesting outside Facebook’s offices in Dublin over the social network’s use of coal-produced energy.

Volunteers for the Irish branch of the lobby group unfurled a large banner designed like a Facebook page outside the Grand Canal offices.

Greenpeace claims that Facebook’s US data centres in Oregon and North Carolina are powered by companies that generate the majority of their electricity from coal.

It also says that the electricity used to power the internet as a whole would see the internet ranked fifth among countries for electricity consumption.

The organisation aimed to set a Guinness World Record with its Facebook ‘unfriend coal’ campaign and already appears to have done so, with over 50,000 people posting comments on their page. Apparently, multiple comments from the same person will still count towards the total figure.

Greenpeace is calling on Mark Zuckerberg to pledge to ‘go green’ by 22 April – Earth Day 2011.

This Greenpeace video about the Facebook founder might not win him over to their cause, though: