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This summer I attended a semi-annual symposium put on by NewWoW, an interesting and varied group I have belonged to for the last few years. NewWow, which is the brain child of Joe Ouye and Jim Creighton, is essentially composed of three types of people: HR people, technology people, and real estate/facilities people. It’s really an interesting mix of experts, and the symposium this time was on Sustainability.

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Hal Levin was the invited presenter, and did a white paper reviewing the literature about sustainability, which he has been championing from his home/office in Santa Cruz for the last 30 years. Hal also did a presentation on sustainability which was much of the focus of the symposium. The question for this meeting was to see if new ways of working, i.e. working from home, a satellite office, working in distributed teams across geographies etc. would help with environmental sustainability?

What is sustainability?

As anyone who has seen Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” knows the polar ice caps are melting, the level of Co2 in the air is 100 parts/million higher than it was 100 years ago. England is flooding, Greece is having a drought, hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans, no snow in the Alps or in the Sierra Nevada moutains, Force 5 tornados, and the list of wacky weather goes on...

With over 6 billion people on the planet, and a maximum of 8.5 billion
(expected to peak mid-century) environmental sustainability looks doubtful and our kids will inherit a planet with weather gone wild and an increasingly toxic environment.

Yet anyone driving around the San Francisco Bay Area will probably notice all of the Toyota Priuses. My interpretation of this is that many people in the SF Bay Area are trying their best to have a lower carbon footprint, and do their part for the environment (as well as get better gas milage). The sad part is that according to Hal Levin, one Coal Fired power plant could undo all of the lowered carbon emissions from all of the Priuses in California.

What Matters?

There were some companies (IBM, HP, Sun, Google) that are doing a lot to be sustainable or “Green” through solar power, bussing employees, and a variety of other methods to cut down their carbon footprint. But the fact is that the growing population in China has great power demands and that 544 new coal burning power plants will be coming on line worldwide over the next few years. Coal power plants are one of the dirtiest ways of producing power and coal-fired generators emit roughly twice the national U.S. average emissions, which means that all we do to cut our carbon footprint is more than negated by the new power plants coming online worldwide.

I found this message rather depressing; after all I work from home, try to reduce my commuting to Silicon Valley, have cut my air travel (which by the way is one of the worst offenders in terms of introducing Co2 into the upper atmosphere where it has 3X more effect on global warming) from over 100,000 miles a year to less than 20,000 (with the result that I get the worst seats on the plane every time (stuck in the middle next to a crying baby)) and all of it may have no effect on environmental sustainability!

According to Hal, that does not mean we should not do everything possible to reduce our carbon footprint. The environmental impact of the world population by 2050 will be more than 4x what it was in 2000 and by the end of the 21st century it is projected to be 11.6 times greater than at the beginning of the century.

If we look at how much the U.S. participates in this global warming, we have a population of 300 million (5% of the world population) and yet we use 25% of the world's energy. The Energy (25%) and the Transportation industries are the two biggest offenders in contributing to global warming.

After a number of my colleagues from Europe presented at the Symposium, it became clear that Europe was far ahead of the U.S. in terms of sustainability. In many of the population centers, the bicycle was the main mode of transport and/or public transportation was readily available. They are designing energy-efficient houses and workplaces, and overall, seem to have put much more thought (and action) into the issue of sustainability.

Collaborative Environments

At the symposium, although I did not give one of the major presentations, I did propose that any number of collaborative environments would help us cut down our carbon emissions and decrease our carbon footprint.

I know that Web and video conferencing have personally allowed me to cut down on my travel. However, in a conversation with an executive at IBM a few months ago, he mentioned that more people attended the 2007 LotusSphere in Second Life than attended in person (LotusSphere takes place in Orlando the last week in January). His second statement was the one that I found hard to understand: "The carbon footprint of a person in Second Life was even higher than it was in real life." At the time I objected to this, saying that there was no way possible this could be! However, after investigating a number of 3D collaborative environments (including Qwaq and Sun Labs Wonderland), I began to understand that Second Life is a polygon-intensive environment and each server can only support a few people so Second Life has a huge server farm--pulling a lot of power--to support the 40,000 (of its 8 million members) who use Second Life every minute of every day. So there is the possibility that collaborative technologies could be creating a larger rather than a smaller carbon footprint.

The Critical Question for Collaboration

So I asked at the symposium if there is an easy way to determine if using any collaborative technologies is making my carbon footprint smaller or larger.

I did not get a a response that pointed towards any website with a carbon calculator for technology use (though there is one that will show you what your carbon footprint is for any plane flight you take). The consensus is that there is no such tool currently available on the Web and that one should be created.

It might even be a good idea for some of the technology companies mentioned above to create a consortium that would develop such a tool. Or maybe NewWoW itself will step-up and create the tool. Kudos to whoever does; it would be a good thing to know and may affect the green policies and the use of collaborative technologies at many enterprises and even at SMBs like Collaborative Strategies.