Two different articles this week both struck the same set of nerves.

"ROHS – More harm than good?" looks at the unforeseen side effects of the EU RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) directive, especially as it applies to the use of lead in solder to manufacture computers. (Clarification: the 7% increase cited in energy usage applies to the solder applciation process, not to the computer itself as the article implies. The net effect on the computer is very small.) "The Clean Energy Scam" looks at the unforeseen effects of biofuels and goes a step farther, calling the whole thing an intentional deception of the world's population.

These articles raise a number of key points for me.

First, I've written before about the lack of magic answers, as much as we'd all love to find them. When you take any societal-scale process or product and think you've found a totally clean, side effect free, economically viable substitute for it, you're almost surely delusional. Any substitution will have other, new side effects, and we absolutely need to try to be accounting for them. (more on this below)

Second, we've got to avoid painting products and processes as "bad" or "good". Biofuels are only a scam if you believed that they didn't have any negative side effects. Everything is somewhere in the middle, its only a matter of degrees. Probably the classic case of the effect of this black-or-white mentality is nuclear power. Is it the answer to all of our energy problems? No, but it might be part of the answer. Unfortunately it got such a bad name that we stopped most of our work on it in the US, so we've lost decades of potential advancements that may have been significant.

Third, a common reaction to these scenarios is "well, only if only someone had done a complete life-cycle analysis and factored in all of the externalities, we would have known all of this ahead of time". The concept is fine and in the right direction, but there's a number of issues: 1) these analyses are amazingly complex, and we currently lack the tools to accurately do them for all but the most trivial products, 2) its very hard to factor in behavior changes by consumers, and 3) there's a core moral and societal question of the relative cost/value of these externalities. Which is worse: lead-based solder in landfills, or 7% more energy use in the solder process?

Finally, we need to be careful about passing judgement on new technologies. I believe that biofuels are going to play an important part in our long-term energy map. I also believe that those biofuels are going to be much different than the ones we are producing today. Decades of ingenuity have gone into the infrastructure, systems, cars, generators, etc that we have today. We need to let some of these new technologies mature before we pass judgement on them. Some of them may never mature, and some may look pretty bad for awhile before they do, but at this point I don't think we're in a strong enough position to be discounting any idea.

Summary:

• There are no effect-free solutions. We need to guesstimate the effects of all potential solutions, measure their real effects if we put them into practice, and compare alternatives to the best of our collective ability.
• We cannot afford to paint things black or white. We need to be able to differentiate a wide range of shades of green, and be willing to give new technologies some extra slack.

A couple of quick items of note from Environmental Leader over the last week.

First, Thin Clients Trump PCs On Energy Consumption provides some real-world data on the energy advantages of thin client architectures. We've seen benefits in management overhead and security also, but more and more companies are exploring the energy benefits and getting results. I often find that people aren't aware of our thin client SunRay products or virtual desktop offerings, but these savings are real, so check 'em out if you haven't already done so.

Second, Alliance For Climate Protection Launches $300M Marketing Push talks about the launch of the new program by the Alliance for Climate Protection, and their new website wecansolveit.org. $300M for advertising to raise awareness? Man, that's a lot of money. I really find it hard to believe that's the most effective thing we can do today for the environment with $300M, but, hey, its not my dough so who am I to say.

Haven't blogged a lot this year, but there's been a good reason. In late December Jonathan called me and asked me to take the lead on the MySQL integration. You might be wondering why the VP of Eco Responsibility got tapped for this, but its not that surprising. When singular events occur in the company, such as the $1B purchase of an open source icon, we need to tap resources from all over to cover all of the work that's required.

And in some ways, I suppose I was a logical pick. My Eco job has me working with execs and groups across the company, so building on those relationships to make MySQL an integral part of Sun makes sense. Furthermore, I've got an awesome team driving our Eco agenda, so we've been able to keep our momentum up on that front even with my attention being split for a while.

I probably won't write much about my MySQL work here, but I wanted to spend some time on it today since its a key milestone, the public closing of the deal. There's tons of excitement on both sides as we reach this milestone. There's a lot to do yet, but we finally get to sit down and start doing real work together, which is what everyone's been waiting for.

With the close a number of issues are wrapped up, but a bunch of things can only now get started for real. So I'll probably still be somewhat spotty with my blogging for the next month or two, but I've been accumulating things to talk about, so watch this space.

I had to laugh at this blog in Information Week titled "Going Green Merits Yellow Light". I see this every once in awhile - people so caught up in the green aspects of a product that the "goodness" of the energy savings or lower impact spills over distorts their perspective. In this case the energy efficiency was somehow supposed to have made up for the fact that it was designed by a small company who apparently had some serious engineering (and, ultimately, business) issues.

For procurement, supply chains, vendor selection, etc, environmental responsibility has to be an 'AND', not an 'IN PLACE OF'. Make sure that as your teams increase their focus on eco, they don't forget the stuff that they're already good at, like evaluating product reliability, vendor's financial viability and product fit. If a supplier can't meet your volume needs, all of the green-ness in the world won't help meet customer demands.

But you can also go a step farther and get proactive. Take your best suppliers and vendors today and tell them where you need them to be in a few years. Maybe you're a little ahead of them in thinking about green strategy. Maybe they're putting their green emphasis somewhere that's not as useful to you.

From our customers we're getting more and more eco hurdles to clear in RFPs, but they're all about what we're doing today. Let's talk about datacenters 5 years from now and what you think you'll need. If you're trying to have that discussion with us and we're not listening, send me an email directly. We've got plans, but I want to make sure they're what you need. I'd hate to miss the mark and cause our customers to have to go buy exploding computers from some fly-by-night startup....

There was a bit of a scramble yesterday when Business Week put their own subtitle on my submitted op-ed. Their anti-offset interpretation brought me a bit up short, since the focus of the piece wasn't supposed to be offsets, but carbon neutrality. So clearly I had missed the mark, so thought I'd take another shot here.

First, let's start with what I believe about out our collective situation. GHG emissions and associated climate change are a major challenge, and we don't have a simple solution. We absolutely need a dramatic increase in zero and low-carbon energy sources, but we use so much energy that that won't be enough. We need improvements in basic efficiency, but that's probably going to be good for 20-40% improvement, and won't be enough either. If we want to make serious headway and still have the have the quality of life we all strive for, then we're going to need a lot more, and part of that 'more' is going to have to be some radical innovation and improvement in the design, manufacture and delivery of all of the products, services and infrastructure that make up our economy.

So the main point of my op-ed wasn't about offsets, it was about carbon neutrality. I'm talking to more and more companies whose environmental strategy is defined by a goal of being carbon neutral. They are generally doing some efficiency projects, purchasing some green energy and offsetting the rest. Is this bad to do? Of course not. Their efficiency gains help them and the atmosphere, their green energy purchases help grow the investment in even more green energy, and if they bought quality offsets, those should spur further GHG reductions somewhere in the economy. These are all good things - we're doing them, too - but I personally don't believe they'll get us where we need to get to. So if carbon neutrality spurs people to action, that's a good step, but I don't believe it is sufficient, and here's why.

From the examples in my Business Week piece, if Toyota uses their environmental efforts solely towards carbon neutrality, they never build a Prius. Same goes for the Sun, WalMart and GE examples. So is carbon neutrality bad in these cases? Not necessarily, but it is very important to understand that the positive impact that these companies could have on the environment is way way bigger than what is measured by the carbon accounting that defines 'carbon neutrality' today. It is possible that resources or focus are being diverted away from the big impact in order to be 'carbon neutral', and I'm worried that, in some cases, this may be happening today.

So I believe that if you care about the environment, you want the bulk of Toyota's focus to be on designing cars that can be built and operated far more efficiently. And the good news is that there's a great way to say "thank you" to Toyota and others, which is to buy their products when they make sense for you. Many of you have done that, which is way cool. Businesses also buy tons of products and services, so this can apply to them as well. I've seen some really great ideas for greening corporate car fleets recently (with good financial returns, btw), so Toyota is being rewarded by corporations as well. This is where the virtuous cycle that I discussed lies - a robust market for environmentally positive innovation drives an increase in that innovation, which helps grow demand in the market and so forth.

Summary: carbon neutrality is a step in the right direction, but for many companies, its only a very small part of the overall impact they could have. It is in the best interest of those companies, as well as our collective best interest, that they take a broad view and prioritize appropriately across all of their potential environmental opportunities.

If you don't hang around developers, you may not know that any acronym that starts with YA usually means "Yet Another". In this case, YASC is Yet Another Sustainability Conference.

If anyone profited off of environmental concerns in 2007 it was the conference industry, where a rash of new energy efficiency, sustainability, environmental and green themed conferences hit the market. I found many of them useful, especially earlier in the year when the information was still fresh, but by the end of the year I found myself showing up, doing my part, and heading out. Too many corporate advertisements, too many canned speeches, and not enough real information exchange.

But with so many companies having to work their way up the same learning curve, and with so much innovation starting to happen, I think there's still a need for people to be able to get together and share ideas and experiences. Since our business at isn't conferences, we're free to try something a little different. Based on our experience with "unconference" style get-togethers for developers, we think there's real potential for that format of meeting in the sustainability space. And to see if we're right, we're going to hold on.

So if you're around San Fran in early January (Jan. 10 to be exact), consider stopping by the first OpenEco Energy Camp. We've got over 200 folks signed up, including some big names and thought leaders from a number of area companies. In addition to lots of discussion time there will be book signings, videos and some food. It's an experiment, but as its shaped up I'm more and more convinced that this type of get together has an important role to play.

Hope to see you there!

Yesterday Dell announced that they were going to join the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration. I happened to have been talking with Paul Dickinson about this at the GeSI board meeting last week, and I think that this a good idea.

As we have been saying in the past, alignment among the key players in the electronics supply chain is going to be critical for making deep progress. In particular, I'd like to see EICC (the group formerly known as Electronics Industry Code of Conduct) adopt this (or some variant) and standardize the specific info that will be requested of the electronics supply chain. (Note: this is my opinion, and may or may not reflect Sun's official position within the EICC).

But this idea also highlights the need for OpenEco. If all of the thousands of organizations in Dell's supply chain need to teach themselves about GHG emissions, or go hire expensive consultants, or buy a proprietary software package, this is going to be a costly endeavor. There's nothing magic to reporting carbon emissions, and we need to all work together to make it as easy as possible. Hopefully OpenEco will help some companies get started (US now, other geos coming soon). The easier this gets, the more data will be surfaced, and the faster we'll collectively figure out how to improve.

If you get a chance, read Two Steps Forward: The Six Sins of Greenwashing by Joel Makower. It is the other side of my recent post on the rights of consumers.

These are two sides of the same discussion for the following reason: most of these eco product claims are failing because they are trying to give consumers the answer, instead of the data. Instead of saying "Here's the data on the impact of this product", they want to jump to the conclusion, saying "This product is green. Believe us, if you could see the data you'd agree."

Programs like Energy Star have been successful and effective in trying to simplify complex stories in order to help customers make better decisions. These types of summaries, when done right, can be useful and effective. We can't stop there and think that that's enough, though. Only when we provide open, accurate data on all of environmental aspects of products will we get the kind of green procurement and consumer behavior that we really need.

You're aware of our climate challenges, you're not super rich, and you're out looking for a new car. Its a pretty safe bet that you're taking a look at the stickers on the car windows that tell you how many miles per gallon you might get. In the US there's two numbers, 'city' and 'highway', but you have a good sense of your driving patterns so you know how to weigh these numbers in your decision. And the good thing is that there's a double win - a more efficient car lowers your environmental impact and you'll save some cash in the process.

Next on your shopping list is a computer. Maybe you're buying a server for your company or a PC for home. There's already lots of eco rating schemes (almost all for PCs): Energy Star, 80 Plus, EPEAT and now Climate Savers Computing. With all of these rating systems, it must be easy to find out how much power a new PC will actually use, right? Turns out that the answer is no.

And not only is it difficult to find real power numbers for desktops, but also for servers as well. Not only does this make it harder to make good purchasing decisions, but it makes it hard to accurately size the cooling and power distribution in the datacenter, so people add in fudge factors and guess high to be safe. Unfortunately, datacenter infrastructure runs less efficient at lower utilization, so not only are people buying more than they need, but what they get isn't as efficient as it could be.

I've heard a couple of arguments about why this data isn't available. The first is that the power varies by application. That's true for cars as well, and the answer there is to provide more than one datapoint and let customers extrapolate their own experience. This seems reasonable for computers as well, and the success of server performance benchmarks is another good sign. The second is that the power varies by utilization. Again, I think that customers can deal with the data - lets give it to them.

The last two are that a) there's no standards, and b) configuration options make it too complex. We agree that standards would be great, and there's good progress on that front, but we don't believe that there's a need to wait. Our strategy is to put out power calculators that help people compute the expected power of specific configurations, which helps deal with challenge (b) above. When standards emerge, we'll adapt our processes and data to be aligned with those.

At this point we've got calculators out for some of our higher volume products, and are in the process of working our way through the whole product line. For example, check out the calculator for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server or the Intel-based Sun Fire x4150. We don't have full utilization graphs yet, but those will start to be available at some point as well.

We believe that with our customers facing numerous energy challenges, ranging from practical power and cooling issues to economic issues to environmental issues, they deserve to have an accurate estimate of how much power the products that they buy will use. We are committed to providing that data, and to supporting processes to standardize that data.

Take a look at what we're doing today and give us some feedback.

I was tongue-in-cheek when I originally wrote about the idea, but Fiji water has made it a reality!

I'm not sure if I like their name ("carbon negative") or mine ("double carbon neutral") better.

So, what's better for the environment - drinking "carbon negative" water that's bottled in Fiji and shipped to your store in plastic bottles, or drinking "carbon positive" tap water? You make the call....

I had some time blocked off this morning to finish off a post I've been working on about energy measurement, when IBM got me so confused with their announcement on Friday that I had to put my other project aside (there's also a video here if you're interested).

The announcement starts off simple enough: a) there are lots of opportunities to save energy and money in datacenters, b) customers want to validate that they're actually saving energy. This makes sense. We're seeing the same opportunities in our datacenters and in our customer's datacenters, and we all want to make sure the savings are real.

The next step is where it gets confusing. Most of the people I know are having good luck reading monitoring their equipment, reading their electric meters and looking at their power bills to verify that they are in fact saving energy. But for some reason, IBM says that's not enough. What you really need is an "IBM Efficiency Credit Certificate", which are based on the relatively obscure concept of Energy Efficiency Certificates, which are the lesser known cousin of Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs. And to do these, IBM has partnered with a (tiny?) company called Neuwing Energy, LLC.

Basically it appears that when you finish a project you pay Neuwing some money, which they turn around and pay to one of their verifiers (see their website), who then verify your efficiency gains. In exchange you get a certificate saying what you saved. In theory there is a market that you could sell or auction these certs off at, but after a couple of hours on the web I've been able to find out almost nothing. The presentation on Neuwing's site says that the power companies in three states are required to deal in these, but there's no evidence of a functioning market. Note that EECs are neither required nor sufficient to trade on the Chicago Climate Exchange, which is as close to a real efficiency market as we have in this country today. Nor are these required to report to EPA Climate Leaders or the Carbon Disclosure Project.

So I get the theoretical concept of EECs, though I'm unclear on the practical issues of their value and how you sell them. If you don't plan to monetize them, it seems like a waste of time and money - there's a lot easier ways to understand your energy savings than paying Neuwing. But that leaves me with some questions for IBM:

Does IBM endorse EECs as a full-blown public climate policy? Are they lobbying in Washington and in state houses across the country for a system based on EECs, as opposed to carbon cap-and-trade, carbon taxes or other market-based policies? Whether they wanted to or not, their announcement has brought this obscure cert to the forefront, and they're telling their customers that they should be paying for these things. Is this what they really want to happen?

These things are so obscure that there's lots of opportunity for misunderstanding, confusion and claims of greenwashing (just ask Whole Foods about their REC program). Is IBM really so convinced that EEC's are good environmental policy and good for their customers that they are staking their green credibility on it?

Finally, these questions aren't all rhetorical. I'd appreciate some real data on EECs, and if IBM or someone else with a datacenter has actually acquired some and sold them, I'd be interested in how it works and how much they were worth relative to the energy savings. Maybe this is the future and IBM's just out ahead of everyone else. Or maybe it isn't.

With the release of our CSR report two weeks ago, we've had some renewed attention on our overall carbon strategy.

As we have been, we're currently focused on lowering our actual carbon footprint as low as possible. We have been making good headway, and have a long list of projects still to go which we know will have a good return. And with this long list, our investments in carbon reduction will continue to focus on these projects as opposed to investing in offsets.

At some point the list of projects with clear ROI will start to shorten, and at that point we'll take a look at offsets as a way to continue to allow us to make headway. Is that point in time three years from now? Two? Five? Not sure yet, but we'll be open about our approach.

There is a cost to this strategy, and that cost is that we can't claim that we're "carbon neutral". Right now that's a cost we're willing to live with.

Because we've been willing to talk about not being carbon neutral, I find myself in interesting discussions. Here's some thought-provoking questions that have come up. They aren't meant to prove any specific point, but I think they're useful in helping understand the nature of carbon offsets.

What about the other GHGs? If carbon neutrality is a good idea, what about nitrous oxide neutrality? Methane neutrality? Water vapor neutrality? And beyond the GHG's, what about fresh water neutrality? Is this a mechanism that we want to scale, or is carbon unique in some way?

Can you be "double carbon neutral"? If it is good to offset your emissions, is it even better to offset your emissions twice? Is there a name for this? Anyone want to give it a try?

What happens if the externality cost of carbon gets priced into the market by some mechanism? If a CO2 tax comes into being that represents the impact of emissions, am I automatically carbon neutral, assuming I pay my taxes? If a CO2 cap and trade system is instituted do companies stop offseting?

Let me know how you'd answer these questions!

One of the major ironies of my job is that I end up traveling too much, resulting in a non-trivial carbon footprint. Last week, for example, I had the opportunity to speak before over 4,500 people, and to meet with a major energy producer, but the trip required four different plane flights, hotel rooms and a series of limos and rental cars. On one leg, in particular, Jonathan, John Fowler and I were going between the same two events, so I hopped on the company plane with them, and was razzed the whole trip. Pictures of me drinking bottled water on a private jet should hit the internet soon...

On the trip I saw some interesting eco-related activities, some good, some bad.

• At our multi-day Customer Engineering event in Las Vegas, they handed out nalgene drinking bottles to everyone on the first day. There were water coolers everyhwere, and no bottled water. I'm not sure how many plastic water bottles equal one hiking bottle, but it seems like a really good idea in general. We also had a huge reduction in paper at this event, which is great to see.
• At our Forum 2007 storage event in Denver, our organizers asked the hotel to not turn on TVs and lights in the rooms prior to everyone's arrival. I've always wondered about this strange practice - it was great to see someone step up and put an end to it, at least in one hotel. We also handed out nice notebooks that included recycling tips. However, the notebooks are spiral bound in a way that makes it hard to see how to recycle the notebook itself! Kind of destroyed the good feeling for me. Finally, we did see some nice paper reductions for this event as well.
• My pet peeve of trip was with Avis, who had my car running for me when I walked out into their lot. I'm sure they knew I was on the bus and just turned it on, but it was 50 degrees out so absolutely no benefit to me to have the car running.

Travel should be slowing down a little the rest of the year - the planet and I both need a rest.

The organizing principles of our CSR and Eco Responsibility efforts are Innovate, Act, and Share. Most people get Innovate and Act (responsible products and services, and responsible operation of our extended business), but Share is always tougher to explain. Sun's got a rich history of open standards, open source and transparency, but many people, especially outside of tech, don't understand what these really are and why Sun would bother.

Hopefully that will get easier now, as last week we announced OpenEco.org, a site to help organizations of all kinds measure and lower their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We originally built the core of the tool to help measure and track our own GHG emissions, and realized that everyone else must be facing the same challenges we were. The scavenger hunt of finding the underlying data is specific to each company, but the calculations and the tables of common data they use aren't, nor is the data management that you need to do to update each month and track your progress versus your goals. So we brought in Gil Friend from Natural Logic to help generalize what we'd done in a way that would scale and apply appropriately to others (that's his forte), and created OpenEco.org to give everyone a much easier way to get going.

But wait, there's more. If you've measured your GHG emissions, how do you think you are doing versus other companies in your area? What's your GHG per office employee? You don't know, because as everyone cobbles together or buys a custom tool, there's no way to get your data in the same place and format as other organizations in order to compare them. But OpenEco can do that, since it normalizes all of the data and has built-in tools for comparing.

Finally, the cost. It's free, with one caveat: you have to be willing to let others compare against your data. You don't have to have your name attached to the data (it can be anonymous), but the data has to be visible for others to use.

OpenEco.org isn't a complete GHG tool yet, but it covers buildings of all kinds, and other sources will be added quickly by Sun and the community.

It wasn't an accident that we timed our announcement of OpenEco to coincide with the CDP5 Launch Event last week. The core principles of measurement and transparency run through both efforts, and it seemed like a natural to us. Although 2,400 companies reported last week, I suspect many are in the state we were last year, starting to be weighed down by our hand grown tools and mountains of accumulated data. Hopefully OpenEco will lend a hand.

While response has been great, the most common question I've gotten is why Sun bothered to do this. There's really three reasons. First, we believe that climate change is a common problem, so we need shared solutions. Second, we believe in communities. There's upside such as the ability to compare data, and also a big hand in the ongoing upkeep and evolution of the tools. Finally, its one more thing we can use to change our discussion with organizations we want to sell to. As more companies decide that its time to race our climate challenges, hopefully OpenEco will give them a reason to think of Sun, which will give us a chance to show them how we can help them green their datacenters in addition to measuring their GHG emissions.

Please - check out OpenEco, join the community and help us all move forward!

Last week was one of those that deserved a timely post or two, but didn't get them because there was so much going on.

The week started at the Carbon Disclosure Project annual event in NYC. This was commemorating CDP5, the fifth reporting cycle for the project. From the website: "The CDP website is the largest repository of corporate greenhouse gas emissions data in the world." With over 2,400 companies reporting this year, and over 300 of the S&P 500, the CDP is playing a critical role in transparency and reporting of GHG's. Want to see what a particular company is up to? Look 'em up!

This was our first year, and I was proud of our response. Apparently they thought it was good also, as we were named to the Climate Disclosure Leadership Index.

We were a sponsor of the event in NYC, which was hosted by Merrill Lynch. Bill Clinton gave the keynote, which I thought was outstanding. Many of the same themes we've been pushing (measurement, transparency, tie to economics, innovation). If you get the chance, I'd highly recommend reading it or listening using the links on the CDP homepage.

One of the reasons I'm a fan of the CDP is that they keep themselves small, but carry a big punch. They now represent over $41T in investors (that's right, that's a 't' as in 'trillion'), and I believe you are going to see them applying more pressure to the folks who aren't yet reporting.

The key messages about this year's reports were that a) there are more of them, b) they are getting richer and more accurate in content, and c) they are describing more and more proactive action on the part of the reporting companies. Hard to argue with that!