Yesterday’s post on tree offsets started a good conversation with Adam and Tom Arnold at Terrapass. Apparently Adam’s post was part of an ongoing, and now that I’ve read the others I find we’re on the same page. In particular, take a read through Adam’s Rules of the road for carbon offsets: the trouble with trees. It’s a more complete treatment of the topic than I provided yesterday. Bottom line is still the same: if you’re buying offsets, know where they’re coming from.

As self-appointed eco watch dog for scientific accuracy, I can’t help commenting on Adam Stein’s “Science corner: why carbon sequestration and clean energy are equivalent” on the TerraPass site. I agree that sequestering a ton of CO2 and avoiding emitting a ton of CO2 can be viewed as scientifically equivalent, assuming that both activities happen within the same period of time. However, Adam ignores this time stipulation, and unfortunately the common practice in forest-based sequestration is to ignore it as well.

Last Tuesday Senator Barbara Boxer came by the Santa Clara campus and presented Sun with her “Conservation Champion Award”. This was an exciting day for us - we always appreciate recognition for the hard work we’ve been doing. We know we’ve got a long way to go, but its great to get some pats on the back along the way! Jonathan and I were both fulfilling commitments outside of CA that day, but Greg Papadapolous and Subodh Bapat represented Sun and our eco team with flying colors.

I walked out of a restaurant tonight in SF and fireworks filled the sky. Barry Bonds had hit the home run that put him past Hank Aaron. Having seen Hank play as a child in Milwaukee, obviously I have a soft spot for him. However, it’s still sad to see the record get broken this way. Barry Bonds is not playing today without the help of steroids. Yep, he had to work hard for a long time.

Sorry for the silly title, but felt like a good summary for a survey that we published the results of this week. Since we get a wide range of responses when we talk to employees and customers about the environment, we thought it would be interesting to try to get to their underlying opinions. The first result was that most people want their company to be eco responsible - 73%. That’s the good news.

I’ve been enjoying the posts by Dave Stangis over on the CSR@Intel blog. In particular, I really resonated with his post “What Exactly Is the Social Responsibility of Global Corporations?", and “The color of money….maybe it’s not so tough to be green.". Check out the blog if you haven’t, its another good place to understand what’s going on as big companies, and in particular, big tech companies like Sun and Intel reason through the Eco and CSR issues.

Congrats to AMD on exceeding their initial GHG reduction goal, and on setting another aggressive goal. Great job! As the article mentions, transparency is something that we believe in when it comes to environmental impact, and AMD is setting a great example.

In May I was one of the speakers at Eco Live!, an event we co-hosted with KGO in San Francisco. As part of the event, I did an hour of live radio with Pete Wilson, afternoon radio host at KGO. Pete and I discovered we were both from Wisconsin, and he used that to really make me feel comfortable. I was saddened to hear today that Pete had passed away due to a heart attack during hip replacement surgery.

The Sun Network is now up to 2,834. That’s 128 over last week (nice power of 2!).

Sun network total is now at 2,720. That’s up from 2,676 on Wednesday, so averaging about 15 people a day.