In a recent post I laid out the various areas that we need to account for in the overall environmental footprint of a product. One thing you’ll notice is the the product travels at least twice (once from the manufacturer to the customer and once from the customer to the recycler), but the bulk of the product may travel more times than that. For example, parts may flow through a supply chain such that the heavy parts take two or three hops before the manufacturer, and may take an additional hop after being initially sorted for recycling.

A-Rod just slid into second base and came up clearly trying to elbow Pedroia in the groin. Fortunately for Dustin he was about 6 feet from the bag, so A-Rod had to go a long way and missed him. And people wonder why he’s so despised in Boston…

Apparently our corporate “greenness” is going to be measured by the size of our investment in the environment. Bank of America came out first with a $20B commitment, but was soon out-greened by Citibank at $50B. Most recently, IBM came out at $1B. So what do these numbers mean? Is IBM really 50 times “less green” than Citibank, and 20 times less than BofA? Obviously not, but apparently that’s the conclusion that their marketing department is begging us to make.

Microsoft is bringing software patents to the forefront with their article this week in Fortune. My sense is that they are testing the water - if you have a reaction to this you need to tell them what you think, either directly or through your purchases. The Sun bloggers have already produced some interesting reading on this. Greg P and Jonathan are laying out Sun’s position more and more clearly, and Tim provides his thoughtful-as-always commentary (follow the links to his earlier work, but the last line says it all…“Shut up or litigate”).

I’m at the TTI/Vanguard conference and have just had the honor of hearing a presentation by James Lovelock, one of the historical leaders and visionaries of global environmentalism. His message is pretty straightforward. I’ll try to paraphrase it here: We’ve screwed things up so much that we have to start thinking of big things we can do to counteract the mess we’ve made. Nothing we can do as humans can operate at a large enough scale and fast enough to stop the processes we’ve put into place.

Spent most of the day at Eco Live 2007. Got to spend a couple of hours with RFK Jr. this morning, then did a short speech and introduced him as the main speaker. An honor to meet him, and personally exciting to spend some time together. We had a little less than 1000 in the audience, but it was a great and very interactive crowd. Mr. Kennedy talked a lot from his latest book, but added on some great comments about the role of the wilderness in religion and the role of the environment in American history.

When I recently blogged (here and here) the question of how much energy it takes to build a car, the obvious question is how about a server? We’re starting to do a deeper dive on the complete environmental life of our servers. The big picture is pretty straightforward, and isn’t really specific to servers. In short, we’re thinking of six distinct phases of a a product’s life where energy and natural resources are used:

One of the summers around 2000 United Airlines just totally lost it. Huge delays all of the time, cancelled flights, no reasonable options when your flights were cancelled, etc. Seems like it might be starting to happen again. There’s only a couple of non-stops between Boston and San Francisco anymore, and they’re all pretty full, so that when something happens there’s nowhere for the passengers to go. I showed up at SFO for my 12:50pm to Boston yesterday and found that it was cancelled.

One random thought on Earth Day (US version): I think we need a second one that falls on work day. I believe that over the next few years we’re going to find that, for many people, the biggest environmental impact they can have is related what happens at work, not at home. It’s just a hunch, but in this consumer and service driven economy, I bet I’ll be proven right.

One of the things I’m increasingly interested in is the role of gaming technology in the office. As Sun, with its OpenWork program and increasingly global workforce, gets more and more distributed, we need integrated core services such as secure identity and presence, audio conferencing, multi-party chat, etc etc etc. Today’s massive, multi-player online games are as close as we have to examples of systems that integrate all of these things in a coherent way.