How Hot is the Carbon Monitoring Topic - 150,000 hits in 2 days for carma.org

Many people in the IT profession think Green is a fad.  I mentioned IBM and Carma.org's Carbon Monitoring in this post.  An interesting data point is on carma.org's web site.

CARMA’s First 48 Hours


The numbers are just fantastic: 150,000 visitors from 187 countries in CARMA’s first two days. Just as important are the hundreds of comments and emails we’ve received with congratulations, suggestions, and questions. Thank you. We will begin sifting through them next week. In the mean time, continue spreading the word. There’s so much more to be done — and you’re at the heart of it.

At some point in the future data centers will start reporting the carbon emissions for their data centers. I know of some which have started to track the carbon emissions internally, preparing for the day their PR teams tell them they want to or need to publish carbon emissions for data centers.

After a few more days carma.org published a further summary including their press coverage.

By mid-day on Thursday CARMA was among the top stories on both the BBC Online and CNN.com…and our server was straining to keep up with the load, despite having been beefed up in advance of the launch.

Coverage ranged from the prestigious science magazine Nature to the liberal blog Daily Kos. Juliet Eilperin, reporting in the Washington Post, was among the first reporters to seek comment from utility companies identified in CARMA as major sources of CO2 pollution, including Southern Co., one of the biggest CO2 polluters in the United States, and the sixth biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world. Strikingly, the companies did not dispute CARMA’s findings.

Friction — special interests, corruption, and social and political Inertia — prevent the necessary adjustments, that is, stop the plates from sliding past one another. Information, injected in the right way and at the right time can be like a lubricant that enables the plates to suddenly slip. That happened this week: it’s reasonable to assume every CEO of every power company on Earth now knows just how much CO2 pollution his firm is discharging, and how this compares with his competitors. With this knowledge, the Earth moved. In the weeks ahead, power company investors, creditors, insurers, board members and customers will have the same information.

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Harsh View of Google's North Carolina Data Center

This is an old article from Jan 2007, but interesting in that Valleywag, Silicon Valley's tech gossip Rag, jumped on Google for its North Carolina facility writing:

Lenoir, Caldwell CountyThe fabulously profitable search engine, having pitted two depressed areas in the Carolinas against eachother, has picked Lenoir in Caldwell County as the location of a giant new server farm. I'm sure there will be plenty of rhetoric about the virtues of Lenoir, a former center for North Carolina's battered furniture industry. But Google just chose the county from which it could extract the most grotesque tax breaks.

Google was offered 150 acres on a plate, a 30-year break on real-estate taxes, and a grant from the state government. In short, a $500,000 sweetener for each of the 200 jobs Google will create.

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Green Forrester Research

Forrester Released Two Green Research Documents.  Also here is an InfoWorld commentary on one document.

December 17, 2007
Supply Chain Leaders: Your CEO Wants To Know Your "Green" Strategy -- Do You Have One?
by Patrick M. Connaughton

Tightening regulatory pressure and pervasive media attention are moving supply chain sustainability issues up the corporate agenda. As a result, CEOs are increasingly demanding a strategy from their top supply chain executives. Surprisingly, very few companies are measuring the environmental impact of their supply chains today, but there are leading companies like Dell, HP, Wal-Mart, and others that are ahead of the pack. Early efforts have been focused on obvious areas like packaging and transportation, but future programs must take on a more holistic approach across the product life cycle. To get started, supply chain leaders must thoroughly assess their current state with an end goal of prioritizing and defining new systems that track their companies' carbon footprints, as well as their trading partners' compliance with environmental standards.

December 17, 2007
Green Progress In Enterprise IT
Higher Stakes For Tech Marketers As Green IT Principles Spread
by Christopher Mines

Forrester conducted its second survey of enterprise IT professionals to learn about awareness and adoption of environmental principles in corporate computing. Our October survey shows steady advancement of green IT activities, re-emphasizing the importance to technology marketers of getting their green messaging right.

Infoworld commented on the analysis written by Christopher Mines.

Forrester: Eco-minded activity up among IT pros
Filed under: Green technology

Between April and October, the percentage of companies employing environmental criteria in choosing tech gear jumped 15 percent, according to a study from research company Forrester.

"As of October, 38 percent of IT professionals said that their companies were using environmental criteria in their evaluation and selection of IT equipment, compared with 25 percent in our April survey," says the report titled "Green Progress in Enterprise IT."

Also notable: When asked what was motivating their decisions to embrace more sustainable practices, the No. 1 motivator, shared by 55 percent of all respondents, was to reduce energy-related operating expenses. No surprises there. However, the No. 2 motivator cited by 50 percent of respondent was "doing the right thing for the environment."

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Cisco Appoints Green Guru

Cisco is the latest IT vendor to add a Green Guru.  Jetsongreen.com posted this information.

Cisco_logo There's major action in the data center world, with all sorts of facilities aiming for energy-efficient centers and LEED buildings.  Cisco, led by the undeniably approachable CEO John Chambers, is embarking on a plan to green their business.  It kind of feels like a revival of the old Japanese, waste-elimination era, but there's progress in areas other than efficiency.  Here's what they're doing:

  • 17,400 sf office in Chesterfield Ridge Center (St. Louis Regional Sales HQ) received LEED certification;
  • Their Carbon to Collaboration Initiative aims to reduce company GHG emissions from air travel by 10 %;
  • They hired Paul Marcoux, one of the founders of The Green Grid, to drive green initiatives inside and outside the company - he's become known as the company "Green Guru." 
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