The Sunday Times in London caused a big news splash a week or so ago with their coverage of Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross’ comments about the GHG emissions of Google searches, which apparently turned out to not be Wissner-Gross’ comments, and so on and so on. But the story got our team thinking about the carbon impact of common internet activities, and wondering about the impact of each email, YouTube, iTune, SMS text, and tweet that flies across the net.

I recently got invited to speak at a conference on enterprise carbon accounting in Boston (I accepted, but can’t link to a webapge since they don’t seem to have a one yet). In the blurb on the conference it asks the following question: *“Will my organization be one of the estimated 1 million firms impacted by Greenhouse Gas regulation?". *You could argue semantics and ask what “impacted” means, but the statement seems to imply that a million companies will have to do carbon accounting as a result of legislation.

The UK is looking into banning large screen TVs, claiming that they are at the center of growth in home energy use. I’m sure they are a problem, but it seems a little extreme to go straight to banning, when they don’t even have a program like Energy Star, or any other measurement/labelling system. My sense is that the folks pushing for drastic environmental action need to be a little careful here.

I wasn’t surprised the article in the WSJ over the holidays which was pretty hard on Dell for its “carbon neutral” claim. There’s certainly plenty of room for skepticism. There’s no formal definition of “carbon neutral”, and in the case of a company like Dell (or Sun or others) there’s large parts of the environmental impact that fall outside the formal company boundary (e.g. supply chain, product energy usage by customers).

Report: EPA ‘Cow Tax’ Could Charge $175 per Dairy Cow to Curb Greenhouse Gases My question: are humans next?

Outline for Talk at US Innovation Panel Washington, DC 12/1/08 Today I want to talk about enabling “national scale” innovation, or how to create innovation with thousands, or even millions of people, spanning public and private investment. Why national scale innovation? Simple. Many of our problems are national (and global) in scale and are so complicated that, as much as we’d like to believe it, a researcher in some lab somewhere is not going to invent or discover the magic silver bullet that makes our problems go away.

Today’s headline says that OPEC is likely cutting oil production by 2 million barrels/day. Doing the math, that equates to 740K metric tons of CO2e per day, or 270M tons per year. You can pretty much read the news of the economic slowdown and see the signs of an economy-driven tail-off in global GHG emissions. Obviously we’d all much rather see the reductions coming from efficiency and greener energy, but I’m sure the atmosphere isn’t complaining.

Finally, now I understand.

Catching up on my blogging, I wanted to add some commentary on our membership and participation in the launch of BICEP, or Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy. In the US we spend over $1T a year on energy, so it is a major part of our economy. It seems obvious to say, but energy price and availability of energy effect the delivery of every good and service that makes up our economy.

I got a chuckle out of this. Environmental Leader: Want To Win Awards? Write Longer Corporate Responsibility Reports