Backup Green and Philanthropic Promises with Actions

Greg Galitzine : Green Blog
Greg Galitzine
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Backup Green and Philanthropic Promises with Actions

Al Gore's book in the early 90s, "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit," and Rich Tehrani of TMC's Green Technology World in September 2007 sparked a variety of responses: apathy, ridicule, inspiration, and action for many regarding green technology. It takes brave people to suggest change. In fact, climate change and other environmental change activists publicize ideas, but the actual implementations depend upon service and product providers making changes. The innovations must lead to environmentally-friendly services that are attractive to and purchased by users.

In 2007, Delta Airlines announced a corporate cans and bottle recycling program. (Our Techistan research team searched the Delta site and could not find any reference to it with either of these set of terms: "corporate recycling" or "recycling.") Read about Starbucks' explanation as to their ability or lack of ability to recycle at http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=792.

The Toyota Prius as well as electric cars and other hybrid cars became popular the same year and more so in 2010, largely because of a USA tax incentive but also incentives by Canada, Jordan, UK and other countries.

The telecom industry, often ahead in technology than other industries, has had many role models, has made many promises, and has or has not followed through in green technologies.  Energy may become cleaner and more powerful as more people, endpoints, and technologies are connected within the particular network.

Bob Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a telecom network is proportionate to the square of the number of users in a system: the more distributed users there are on the system, the greater the value of the network and of those endpoints themselves. Services and companies that fit into this scenario very well include TelX, Stealth Communications, Voice Peering Fabric, DIDX, Facebook, Arbinet, eBay, Skype, and Google, of course, with a huge gap between lowest value to highest, but still accurately defined.

Companies that take not only an environmentally-friendly view of providing service to the world but also a philanthropical push to empower the less fortunate include Vocati Communications, Global Crossing, ActivePort, and BetterWorld Telecom LLC (of which Techistan has interviewed the first three and looking forward to the third). BetterWorld Telecom LLC was the first carbon-neutral carrier in the United States. In 2007, it claimed to use VoIP, wireless, and unified communications to shrink its infrastructure, utilities, and energy needs. It had planned to get rid of paper billing. It was using an Internet-based and paperless system. Whenever paper was needed, its preferred was 100% recycled paper. Also in 2007, it was giving 3% of revenue to nonprofit activities that benefitted education, children and the environment. It had set a goal to donate at least one million dollars by the end of 2012.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a nonprofit group of consumers, businesses and conservation organizations, is dedicated to promoting smart technologies to improve the power efficiency and reduce the energy consumption of computers. Some of the organizations involved in 2007 were Intel Corporation, Google and other PC companies. In early 2010, others include the same, plus Dell, EDS, the United States Environmental Protection Agency‎ (EPA), Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Microsoft, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), World Wildlife Fund and more. See the complete updated list at http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/about/member-directory/. The goal was and is to educe energy consumption by computers by 50 percent and reduce global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons a year by 2010.

For more information, consider registering now for http://www.itexpo.com in Miami Beach, Florida on January 20-22, 2010 to participate in Virtualization, SmartGrid, Cloud Computing, and other sessions and summits that involve green technologies and resourceful uses and types of technologies, services, and products. An additional and powerfully-informative and action-oriented event is the IEEE Green Technology Conference scheduled for April 24-25, 2010 in Dallas, Texas. Make your company promises and follow through with action whether in green technology areas or helping those who need help. Be respected and the choice to do business with.



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