Here's a very informative article on offsetting courtesy of the BBC. Oh, and while you're hanging out online at the BBC, here's their interactive guide to climate change.
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Could standard light bulbs be banned and people forced to buy eco bulbs?
I saw this article on Google News without even being logged in to give me personal news stories, so this is obviously a "glowing" topic getting lots of press. Here are a few snips from this New Zealand article.
Australia: Making eco bulbs a standard by 2010
California: also moved to phase out incandescent bulbs by 2012 under
a proposed "How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb
Act".
The "Eco bulb" claims to use one-fifth of the energy, last up to nine years and save $100 in electricity costs.
New bulbs in homes were already saving 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes of
carbon dioxide a year and "you could add a zero to that if the whole
country switched over".
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The first ever Climate Change Week is coming up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia March 8-9 (if anyone from Malaysia reads this blog!?). A book will be launched simultaneously titled 'Cut Carbon Grow Profits' that will be highlighting leading companies and what they're doing.
Why on earth am I telling you this?
Sun will be featured in the book for the company's Eco Responsible Initiative -- both on its commitment and its leadership.
OK - so we did our quiet launch of our eco theme for Roller this week. I say quiet because it's tricky to release a new blog theme to an online community and expect anyone to try it out, even if it's totally free. If we made a big internal announcement who knows if we'd get any "switchers" at all. They may not like the announcement, or not like be told or encouraged to try a new theme. At the same time, if you don't tell them, how are they going to know, except for word of mouth? Or online chatter?
The inspiration for this entry is an entry I read about Blogger.com by the designers who redesigned the entire blog. Stop Design. I was impressed by how open and honest -- and technical -- they were on how they designed it.
First, it's a big commitment to switch themes, particularly for active bloggers. There are the issue of unknowns. Unknown bugs. Unknown reaction from your readers - this is a biggie, particularly if you've got tens of thousands of readers like some Sun bloggers have. Maybe you've lost some of those hacks you did on your old theme. There's also the unknown unknowns, which can be very stressful :)
When 'shopping' for a new theme, you can ask yourself, does this blog theme really speak to me? Does it represent?
There is also the design theory that themes shouldn't even exist. After all, unless you're part of a group blog, they're for the most part individual and personal, and therefore you should design your own. And your theme could really define you, so using someone else's theme is just plain scary.
In a previous entry I had promised to provide a bit more information on the theme's creation. We designed this theme because of Sun's commitment to Eco Responsibility, its commitment to its employees, to bloggers, and also Sun's commitment to sharing, openness, and participation. If you know Sun, then you know how committed we are to these listed things above. At the same time, we thought it was time for a new theme for Roller, so we put the two and two together and realized it was the perfect storm - and the perfect time to design a new eco theme.
I am not a designer by trade, so pardon me for not using words like 'design elements', but here's what we essentially set out to do on this theme. As you can see, all of our wishes were pretty subjective in the end.
Keep it very simple
Not be heavy-handed. In other words, not preachy. For instance, go light - don't have very many, if any, images (ie. no trees, leaves, nature, global images, etc.) -- in the end we have NO images at all.
Make it green - but not just any green. We wanted just the right green. That perfect green. As they say, it's not easy finding the right green. Did we find it?
Have it look easy on the eye
Highly functional yet still clean (this was up there on the priority list)
And then, partly in homage to the goal of eco design, we took it a step farther - almost to a more philosophical level. We wanted to truly create an 'eco-friendly' theme, if that was even possible. How the heck do you do that?
So we added these requirements:
Clean (yes, more emphasis on this)
Minimal -- no waste!
Open -- no clutter
Flexible (ie. many uses, many bloggers could use it, or modify it)
Sustainable - that it wasn't going to get dated quickly - ie. would have a relatively long lifespan, like a great product
Actionable - here we added rotating Eco Action
Raise Awareness - here we added rotating Eco Facts
and of course...
Innovative
Did we achieve it? We wanted to make sure that whoever used it was going to be able to change things on it without much difficulty (that remains to be seen).
Sun loves feedback, so let us know what you think. Did we meet our goals?
Thanks to those courageous souls who've already switched though, such as Carolyn's Participate blog, and Mary's amazing Mary Mary blog and a handful of others - you know who you are!
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Back from my Florida vacation. I was off but I was on, talking to my parents about the importance of being green.
Back on the homebase, we had a flurry of press coverage.
COOL ECO PODCAST
http://podcast.tech-talk-with-craig-peterson.com/index.php?id=501
Running Wild
The Wall Street Journal, Christopher
Lawton;
January 29, 2007
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116974913653887953.html
Servers have gotten much more powerful in
recent years. But they've also gotten hungrier.
In 2006, businesses world-wide spent about
$55.4 billion on new servers, according to market-research firm IDC. To
power and cool those machines, they spent $29 billion, almost half the
cost of the equipment itself -- and that number is rising. With the
average
server system, the customer spends "more on power and cooling over
its entire life cycle than what they will spend up front," says
Michelle
Bailey, research vice president at IDC.
Energy Hogs on the Server Farm
By David Raths
Public CIO
December 27, 2006
http://www.public-cio.com/story.php?id=2006.12.19-102972
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Airplanes continue to come under fire for being anything but eco-responsible, perhaps spurred by this new report.
The U.S. airline industry discards enough aluminum cans each year to build 58 Boeing 747 airplanes, along with thousands of tons o plastics, magazines and newspapers. All of this waste represents unrealized potential for airlines and airports to save money, reduce global warming pollution and improve efficiency. -- NRDC via Makower blog
My sister just sent me an SMS that USA Today this morning that has a big story about jet polution. And Joel Makower has a related story.
source: NRDC via Joel Makower blog.
From USA Today:
- The FAA projects that the number of U.S. airline passengers will nearly double from 739 million last year to 1.4 billion in 2025
- On a New York-to-Denver flight, a commercial jet would generate 840 to 1,660 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. That's about what an SUV generates in a month.
- Aircraft emissions pollute the air and threaten by 2050 to become one of the largest contributors to global warming, British scientists have concluded.
PHOTO SOURCE: USA TODAY
My two cents: Sun employees do fly to meetings if we have shown ample justification. For every flight we are required to get our manager, sometimes even VP-level, approval. If it is a strategic meeting with a customer or partner and are not under strict travel restrictions we get approved. But not all of the time. I have been denied travel before if the trip is not considered strategic. I think this is important to show your managers reports like these so they can further shape their own decisions on when flying is 'strategic'.
Think about what can be done via email, phone, video conferencing, WebEx, etc. Perhaps a New Years Resolution for myself: Fly Less in 2007 and instead of flying overseas or across country for vacation find interesting things to do right around my own town.
One note from USA Today story: The biggest contributor of pollution is not airlines. The biggest contributors are "vehicular traffic and power plants." Even still, "its emissions are considerable."
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Source: New Scientist.
According to New Scientist, grass may be the best source of biofuel. According to the researchers, it is actually "carbon negative" even after you use fossil fuels to transport it to the refinery.
"The use of fossil fuels to power the process releases 0.3 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year - but the growing grasses store 4.4 tonnes of CO2 in the roots and soil, meaning the net result is 4.1 tonnes removed from the atmosphere. The stems, leaves and flowers of the grasses also absorb CO2 but this is then released again when the grassland biofuel is burned later on – meaning no net gain or loss of CO2."
<snip>
Humble grasses may be the best source of biofuel, say researchers, who
estimate grasses could provide 19% of global electricity needs at the
same time as soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. <unsnip>
Corn as the crop for biofuel has been criticized because of the amount of energy it takes to grow it, harvest it, etc.
It's definitely going to take a mix of innovations to reduce our impact on the environment or to return earth to how it once was. With every innovation that is seen by some as positive there are immediately those who see negatives. Are there innovations out there with no negatives? My definition of innovation is that which improves on something that already exists. But by improving something the most obvious naysayers are those whose previous innovation now has little value.
Should innovation with no negative impact be a goal, given the limited amount of resources on our great planet? After reading Cradle to Cradle, it makes me think that humans should make this our goal.
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According to CNET: Boeing-Spectrolab has developed a solar cell that can convert
almost 41 percent of the sunlight that strikes it into electricity, the
latest step in trying to drop the cost of solar power, potentially bringing each cell down to 3 dollars a watt. Current commercial technologies get about half that.efficiency.
The solar race, as previously discussed on CNET, is to bring the cost of solar down to one dollar per watt, and by increasing conversion efficiencies that can help meet that goal. It's interesting stuff. Dare I say 2007 is the year of the Sun?
I am not an engineer or scientist, but this stuff provides endless optimism and fascination for me.
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It's never been easier to cool down your data center.
Did you know that starting today that Sun's Try and Buy program at Sun just got cooler? Now Sun is including a Power Meter with your order of a Sun Fire T1000 or Sun Fire T2000 eco-responsible computers (yes, the ones with breakthrough energy-savings and that are eligible for the PG&E Rebate if you are in their region. This allows you to quickly test your installed servers with your new order to see just how energy efficient it is. And from that you can easily figure out how much money you're going to be saving your company. This is the first time IMHO that any vendor is doing something like this. And from that you could win a server, just buy submittting your results.
Simply put, how cool is that? I attached some pictures. All the details can be found here.
OK, a Few Detail (and more photos) below:
As part of Sun's Power Meter program, each Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 system shipped as part of the Try and Buy program will be supplied with a free P4400 Kill A Watt power meter from P3 International, supplied by Teledynamics LLP. (We don't endorse one power meter over another, but believe the more inexpensive ones do a good job of giving you an idea). This lets customers measure and compare power consumption in their actual datacenter environment. This one is regularly priced at thirty bucks. Also - some fine print - since power meters are region-specific this is best for North America use only.
Sun
will also supply Try and Buy customers a guide to demonstrate how to
use low cost power meters with the Sun Fire CoolThreads servers. The quick-start guide to get you started to measure your power measurements is here, though once you get serious you'll want to go here.
Sun also provides a formula to calculate the Performance per Watt metric.
Divide the performance the server delivers (i.e. simultaneous users, transactions per minute, etc.) and divide by the power consumption reported over the duration of the benchmark test.
Additionally, by plugging results into Sun's SWaP calculator you can reveal the true level of performance, power and space efficiency of the servers.
Equipment:
P4400 Power Meter
1:3 outlet converter
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Hi Mom,
Here is the green wishlist I promised you. I don't really expect you to get me the solar-powered messenger bag as the Timbuktu bag Sun gave away at JavaOne during Bike to Work week is working just fine.
I understand your anxiety now with such steep eco requirements for Hanukah this year (and every year). I am glad I took the time to create a shopping list for you.
Froogle was pretty buggy and so I don't recommend anyone use it unless they have a lot of patience and time (I was sick in bed). It also doesn't find every gift out there very easily. Neither did Amazon. In fact, I have found the green-wishlist-making chore a big pain. There really is not a good site out there yet to find green gifts. I looked at all the top results in Google, including NRDC, Sierra Club, and an old Wired article. Not much there really.
Then I went to my old standbys - WorldChanging, Treehugger.com, and a few others I am sure. But lo, nothing was satisfactory. I had to do it the hard way, one website at a time, with very specific search criteria such as 'recycled rubber briefcase'. I guess nothing really ever changes. If your mother is like mine and just wants you to tell her what to get you, there's no better way than picking out the gift yourself and making her job that much easier.
There was a good comment though that I did not think of on my previous post that another gift idea are music gift certficates.
Oh, and as for wrapping paper, how about this year use grocery bags or material from packaging that is currently sitting in your recycling bin.
OK, I'll give you a call now, as I don't think you ever read this blog, not yet anyway:)
Love,
Aaron
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Go Green!
