The other day, I wrote a post about Carbon Accounting as articulated by BT for the SAP Community Network:

I am dismayed. While I appreciate the efforts being made by companies like BT to promote the notion of solving sustainability issues, imposition of what are arbitrary standards and methods is not the way to go about it. In looking at BT’s approach I note they are attempting to apply a model that can be summarized from this reporting in Computing:

Developed by BT director of sustainable development Dr Chris Tuppen, the Climate Stabilisation Intensity (CSI) model links data on a firm’s carbon emissions and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), to global emission reduction goals recommended by the UN, to work out an appropriate emission reduction target for the firm.

The nub of the problem lays in the fact that it is almost impossible to arbitrate across industries on standards of this kind without an understanding of the different inputs and outputs that constitute a particular carbon footprint. At the same time, what matters to one company may not matter to another when it comes to discussing carbon emission reduction effectiveness. For example, if the cost of adding solar power requires a payback that’s outside the company’s usual rate of investment return do you do it for the sake of going green? The answer to that is clearly ‘no.’

It might instead be more effective to lobby local politicians to pressure solar companies into finding ways to reduce their costs so that you can justify the investment.As I say plenty and often, carbon emission reduction may be a top C-level item in boardroom discussions, but it has to take place within the context of an economic environment.

I have an upcoming trip to the UK which involves going to both Bangor and Leeds. There are two of us on the trip. Trying to figure out the most cost effective way to manage the trip is hard enough but then I also need to factor in the carbon emissions element. Here’s how it goes:

• Booking with RyanAir from Granada to Liverpool comes in at €219
• Flying with Jet2.com from Malaga to Leeds-Bradford costs €470
• The train from Liverpool to Leeds costs £37.80 (single) while Bangor to Leeds is £44.00. I’ve not factored in Liverpool to Bangor because it is possible we can get a ride for that part of the journey, assuming we fly into Liverpool and go to Bangor first. I could hire a car at Liverpool which would come in at around £100 plus fuel for the time we will be in the UK.
• If we travel from Granada then long stay parking works out at €40 but is free in Malaga but the journey to Malaga is an extra 130km in both directions which will cost roughly €28 and involve an extra hour’s driving each way. If we fly to Liverpool then on the return we either book a hotel for possibly 4 hours sleep at a cost of £65 or hang out in the airport and conserve some cash. Any thought of getting sleep on a RyanAir flight is wishful thinking. Returning from Leeds means a cab ride costing aorund £13-15 as there is no reasonable public transport option that allows us to reach the airport for check-in.

It seems to me that which ever way we organize the trip, we’ll end up with roughly the same cost because the savings in flight fares in going to Liverpool will be swallowed up by additional costs elsewhere. I’m not sure we gain anything from flying to Leeds because we still have the problem of making the Bangor journey. I’m not convinced there is any real difference in carbon emissions cost as the flight times are virtually identical and the train journey times are not so far apart as to make a demonstrable difference. I’m prepared to be flexible if I could only work out the best combination of travel methods.

What I really want is a service where I can input those parameters and have it spit out the optimal combination of cost, time and carbon emissions load so I can then assess the best way to make the journey. Unfortunately, I can’t find a site that does this. Surely if we’re going to get serious about traveling in a cost effective yet least harmful manner, then a service of this kind makes sense? Today, we have discrete aggregator services like Kayak, that focus on flights or Travelocity that only factor flights, hotels and car hire. And yes, I also want SMS notification in case there are any likely delays. Some might argue that is good enough but I’m far from convinced. I’m reasonably certain I’m not an edge case on this one so if anyone does know a service that provides the information I’m trying to find then I’d love to hear about it.

Two entirely unrelated posts caught my attention today. Tom Raftery asks whether SaaS saves greenhouse gases. Quick as a flash, Chris Yeh from PBWiki does some back of fag packet calculations and comes up with the startling conclusion:

That means PBwiki could be saving the world up to 585,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or the equivalent of driving an SUV around the world 50,000 times!

Tom is sceptical of the assertion, qualifying it to say:

Now, obviously not all 500,000 hosted PBWiki’s are replacing an individual server but say 100 PBWikis replaces one server, or 1,000. That’s still somewhere between 600 and 6,000 tons of CO2 PBWiki are saving the planet per annum.

That’s still pretty impressive but like Tom, I’d like to see harder numbers. Elsewhere, Simon Wardley, whose thinking is generally both out of the box yet spot on talks about finding new ways to shed extra pounds.

Anyway for reasons of vanity I’ve decided to do something about my additional mass. Having caused environmental damage gaining it, I’d rather minimise the environmental cost of removing it. Whilst one obvious option is to spend time down the gym, I was wondering whether anyone has done a study of how much additional co2 such pointless exercise causes. I say pointless because there are usually no additional benefits to gym exercise other than the exercise itself.

What I’m looking for is exercise with some form of point, such as an allotment or forestry work or volunteer gardening. However, I’d still be interested to know what each kilo of my additional mass means in unnecessary and unsociable environmental damage caused.

That seems like an eminently good way to look at the problem of exercise that yields a net-net positive outcome. Until I read Simon’s post, I was thinking about investing in a WiiFit. But then I’d also have to calculate the amount of energy I’d be consuming by running the Wii. Ugh!

It seems that sometimes, you just can’t win. Unless of course you’re prepared to consider Simon’s option.

Eddy de Clercq is my kinda guy. A software engineer who works at a Belgian university, Eddy is widely known among his community for his sharp wit and incisive points of view. He makes the kind of connections many miss and tries really hard to live the sustainable life. This from a recent post about bottled water:

I’ve seen somebody drinking O2 water the other day. Not only it had artificial kiwi and apple flavour but also extra oxygen added. According the ‘manufacturer’, it uses patented technology from Life Technologies, Inc. to put extra oxygen into ordinary water. The resulting beverage has 10 times more oxygen (72mg) as ordinary water and provides an extra boost of energy by increasing the amount of oxygen in your blood. What a load of crap! Who needs this kind of water anyway? Nobody compos mentis does.

Eddy then goes on to rant about the resources that go into producing different kinds of bottled water and the impact it has on the environment. Given that our industry uses a LOT of water, not just to quench our individual thirst but also as a resource for data centre cooling, should we not give this apparently innocent aspect of our lives greater consideration?

Eddy has been helping me out on a sustainability project I am working upon. He may be The Grumpy Old Man, but he’s got a heart of gold. How many others might you know who fall into that category?

On a related economic note, my wife told me that a 500ml bottle of Pennine water in a local supermarket cost her 39p. The same bottle in a shopping centre not five miles distant was £1. I know there’s money in O2, I just didn’t realize there is quite so much.

Courtesy of my old mucker James Governor, I see McAfee is leading the charge in greening up its events. Reporting about a recent conference held in Las Vegas, McAfee made sure it was as close to being carbon neutral as possible. By the numbers:

In support of its environmental commitments, McAfee took steps to “green” the event in advance. According to ICF International’s measurement, through a series of event planning decisions and participant education efforts, McAfee reduced the event’s carbon footprint by 16% of its total non-air travel emissions. Specific CO2 emissions savings included:

• 25 metric tons saved by facilitating the sharing of rooms by participants
• 3.2 metric tons and 56,357 gallons of water saved through participation in the hotel’s towel and sheet reuse program
• 0.5 metric tons saved by providing a shuttle for airport and event transfers rather than travel by individual taxicabs
• 0.5 metric tons saved by eliminating bottled water and providing tap water only

“Companies who are committed to sustainability and minimizing their environmental footprint must first understand where their material impact can be made,” said Craig Ebert of ICF International. “For companies in the knowledge economy, often that material impact is in their electricity use, business travel and corporate events. We applaud McAfee for its industry leadership in corporate sustainability by conducting this in-depth measurement project, taking steps to reduce and offset the environmental impact and being transparent in sharing the results with others for the common good.”

Among the overall findings of the formal measurement project of the remaining environmental impact:

• The carbon footprint of the overall event was approximately 1,856 metric tons of CO2, or 1.03 metric tons of CO2 per event attendee
• 90% of the event’s carbon footprint resulted from air travel to and from the event
• Excluding air travel, of the remaining 10% of the event’s carbon footprint, the breakdown was as follows: food (35%), hotel rooms (33%), amenities (19%), facility use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) (5%), solid waste (4%) and the event’s conference center (3%)

MacAfee used carbon offsets to compensate for the travel element, contributing to a reforestation project in Louisiana.

Ironically, James Governor’s Greenmonk is holding an Energy Camp unconference next week - in Las Vegas.

Business travel among software companies is a major contributor to CO2 emissions. One of the ways to overcome this is to organize virtual events. Like the one I recently ‘attended’ along with more than 2,000 SAP employees. Savings amounted to 724,000 km in travel alone for the three day event.

D-Link has announced the introduction of two first-to-market business-class unmanaged Green Ethernet switches. Developed to enable small to medium-sized enterprises to reduce their energy costs and optimise energy efficiency, the new DGS-1016D 16-port and the DGS-1024D 24-port high performance Gigabit switches claim to deliver energy savings of up to 45 per cent when powered down.

According to the company, the new switches don’t require any changes to existing network infrastructure and should not show any difference in performance over other switches. While it is too early to be certain, D-Link believes that reduced heat and power output should lead to greater longevity. The real question however is what impact will Green Ethernet have on consumption. The company says:

In early 2007, IEEE formed an Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) study group investigate this idea of power saving with network equipments when PCs and laptops (most of which ship with GigE cards now) LAN links are idle, or not utilizing full bandwidth. Researchers have estimated that in the U.S. alone, companies could collectively save $450 million a year in power costs by using such a technology.

Those savings may be ambitious and at the top of the range because according to Green Ethernet:

The following are some typical values estimated for US energy savings from EEE:

• 1 Gb/s link EEE: $250 to 300 million per year
• 10 Gb/s link EEE: $40 to 80 million per year

See this document for the detail.

In a SOHO environment, actual savings will depend on the cable length used. At present the optimum length is 20 metres.

This is one of the first announcements in what I see as a general trend towards managing power use in computing infrastructures. It is not an easy task because there are numerous complexities and interweaving factors that dictate exact power usage. In the scheme of things, the savings outlined are a flea bite when compared to total power usage. But at least it is a welcome start.