Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

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 (that's Greg in the picture accepting the award from the Senator).

One of the reasons that I think this visit was important is that it was another step in the dialogue between business and government on energy. I think everyone's pretty much accepted at this point that neither the government nor business can address our energy and climate challenges alone, and in fact we need both to be on their best game.

I'm spending lots of time in DC these days, and interacting regularly with our public policy folks around the world. There's lots of useful discussion going on, but there's some huge entrenched interests with big money involved as well. Businesses have the benefit that a good fraction can do more or less the right thing, and pull along the laggards. There's only one federal government, however, and we need it to hit at least a triple, if not a home run. State-level initiatives help by giving us some testing ground, but if we want to meet these challenges with the best economic outcome, it has to start at the federal level.

So, as a result, we really appreciated the Senator coming by, sharing her thoughts and listening to what we're up to and what we're concerned about. Government needs to be careful not to listen too carefully to industry on this one, but having thoughtful legislators who are clearly intent on learning and listening come by and spend time can never be a bad thing.

Thanks for the award and your visit, Senator Boxer!

And, importantly, thanks to everyone at Sun that makes an award like this possible!

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.

But those same people were then quick to admit that they fail to engage in basic energy conservation activities at the office, while they readily do it at home. As an example, 52% said they turn off lights when they are done using a room at the office, while 92% said they'd do it at home.

When asked why the difference in behavior, the respondents were given a range of options. The most common by far was "Not sure" (so you can understand why we didn't put that in the release - not very conclusive!). My guess is that its a combination of feeling like its someone else's problem, and not seeing any direct payback (more money in the budget?) for changing behavior, but that's just a guess.

Companies are only as good as the people who make them up. This poll made it clear that there is an eco-gap at the office, and that its not a matter of knowledge, but of willingness and motivation. Send me your thoughts - I'd like to understand this better.

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.

One place I'd like to differ with Dave is on his use of the word 'green'. Is 'green' a state of mind, good intentions, or is it a result of actions? Dave says that Intel has been green for years, but that statement only makes sense if you use the first two definitions. Intel's carbon footprint is at the end of this article, and its not small. (Kudos to them for being one of the early reporters through the Carbon Disclosure Project, ours is submitted and will show up when the publish the CDP5 report.)

Maybe we're being too conservative, but at Sun we've decided to not use the word 'green' when referring to ourselves. We're not green. Our products and operations use lots of energy (255,000 tons of CO2 from our US operations, lots more from our products), we ship lots of lead in our products (solder), etc etc. We are, however, making big improvements throughout the company, so I will say we're 'greener', but 'green'? No way, not yet.

Speaking of big tech companies, the article above noted that Google won't disclose their CO2 footprint. So lets guess! After polling lots of people (no insider knowledge among them), the consensus is that Google's datacenters are in the 500MW to 1GW range. Using the US average for CO2 emissions from electricity, that would put them in the 3M to 6M tons/year range. That puts it in the range of Intel and 25% to 50% of GE, who's 13 times bigger in revenue. Interesting...