Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

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!