This was written for my Sun blog and cross-posted here Last week I was down in DC with a group of investors and business execs, many of whom were in the green space under the banner wecanlead.org, a collaboration between Ceres and the Clean Economy Network. John Doerr was the headliner of the group, but there were CEOs of some hot company like A123 and Seventh Generation. The motivation for us all to be there was to impress upon our legislators that well-constructed, comprehensive legislation could be good for business.

This week our book, Citizen Engineer, made it out the online bookstores and is supposed to hit the bricks-and-mortar stores next week. The book was written by myself and Sun’s CTO Greg Papadopoulos, with tons of help from John Boutelle. Of course its also important to recognize our publisher, Greg Doench, at Prentice Hall. The website for the book is citizenengineer.org, and there are links there for buying the book at Amazon (paper or Kindle), from the publisher, and other book sellers.

Roger Pielke, Jr summarizes the state of climate legislation in Australia, and speculates on what it could mean for the US. If this is the next outcome here I would think it quite positive - strengthen the renewable energy and efficiency efforts, and drop the poorly designed cap and trade for now.

[Note: I jointly authored this with Dan Sarewitz of ASU] The House of Representatives has passed a massive climate change bill aimed at legislating a new, climate-friendly energy supply into existence through emissions caps, technology standards, and incentives. The bill’s champions assume that, in response to an array of mandated carrots and sticks, nimble startup firms will be motivated to develop new clean-energy technologies that will ultimately revolutionize our use of energy, while investors smelling early profits will line up to fund these activities.

Like many, I’m divided by the passage of Waxman-Markey (aka ACES) in the US House of Representatives. While its passage is a historic event, the bill has so many issues that I find myself as worried as I am excited by it. As Tom Friedman recently wrote (sorry, free registration required to see the whole article): It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption.

I’ve always thought that one of the most interesting and powerful aspects of the US system of government is that individual states can act as test beds for emerging areas of legislation. This is especially important to high tech, where rapid change creates new legal opportunities and issues on a regular basis. As the understanding of the new area occurs, states can enact legislation which explores the space of possible responses.

Every environmentally-knowledgeable person I’ve talked to the last few months has come to the same conclusion: the ACES bill (aka Waxman-Markey) is not going to do anything for the environment, at least for a couple of decades. This has put us all in a quandary. Do we say that its better than nothing and support it, or come out against it, understanding that it will be harder to get the process started later.

Yahoo! has been in the news with its new plans for an energy efficient datacenter in upstate NY, along with plans to discontinue purchasing carbon offsets. First, nice to see Yahoo! join the ranks of those who find they can do more for the climate by investing in their own GHG reduction, rather than buying carbon offsets and investing in others. Second, the article mentions that Yahoo! may patent their datacenter design.

In their effort to add something for everybody in Waxman-Markey, its gotten so huge that I fear that there’s now something for everyone to hate in it.

In our eco team at Sun we are faced with a wave of new external environmental reporting, monitoring, and measurement requirements. We’re big on transparency, but the costs and implied morality are getting to be a drag. One example. Everyone wanted a price on carbon so that it was built into the economy. But even though that appears to be on the way, its now not enough. Now there are folks who want us to report details on the GHG emissions of every aspect of our business, including some who want us to report the complete carbon footprint of each product through the entire supply chain.