Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

Today we announced that we have met our original GHG reduction goal, by achieving a 23% absolute reduction below 2002 levels for the US. I'm excited and proud that we made this milestone well ahead of schedule.

As part of the announcement we also went public with our new goal of a further 20% absolute reduction of our global impact by 2015.

A couple of quick notes. First, why US only? When we set the goal we only had a decent handle on our US emissions. Obviously it would be better if this were a global result, but we've been applying the same techniques in other parts of the world (primarily OpenWork and more efficient datacenters), so I'm confident that we have seen solid improvements elsewhere as well. Also note that our new goal is global.

Second, where did the reductions come from? All of the reductions are a result of changes to operations, practices and the physical plant. Other than the makeup of the power that we get from our utilities, there were no additional purchases of greener energy. Also, there were no offsets or other onetime savings. In other words, the changes that we've done have resulted in a "permanent" reset of our energy and emissions baseline.

And, what did this cost? All of the major changes have had (or are on the way to having) a positive financial return. So while there were short term costs, sometimes in capital, sometimes in driving process change, etc, these activities have resulted in a net decrease in the cost to run Sun day in and day out. We're hoping that we can repeat that same kind of result as we meet this new goal. We have a bunch of targets that should have a good return, but we aren't quite sure we can get the full 20% that way yet.

Finally, thanks to all of the individuals and groups at Sun who helped us make this goal. Well done!

Environmental Leader today reported that "Environmental Friendliness Not Driving PC Sales" (I'd quote the original study, but getting it to read costs more than a couple of PCs).

The conclusions are not surprising: consumers are looking for hard environmental savings, not marketing. In particular, they want to see energy efficiency that leads to real economic savings. But realistically, what else would they use as a criteria? Higher use of recycled cardboard in the packaging? How does a consumer put a value on that?

Unfortunately our whole industry is not yet consistently good at giving people the energy information they need to use the one environmental criteria they seem ready to use - possible savings in the monthly power bill. While Dell highlights some eco interesting looking advancements on the front page of dell.com, I still find it very hard to get any real energy data on specific PC models. Same thing for HP. (Note: in the server space Dell, HP, Sun, and probably others have much better real power data available for most models).

The lesson here for all of is simple, in my mind. We have to explain the concrete environmental and economic benefits in a way that is meaningful to consumers, and give them the hard facts so they assign their own valuation to those benefits. It might not feel "pure" that economics is the way that most people will do that valuation, but if they make better decisions for the environment, isn't that goodness?