Brockmann and Company | Customer Insights

Further to my earlier post on Energy Camp, here are a few other observations.

I spent the day in meetings at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center talking about GREEN.

Green IT, Travel Avoidance and Organizing Green for all employees.

Big things I learned today are:

• We need to standardize travel reporting and measure the carbon effects of business travel.
• We need to train employees to be able to brainstorm, measure the impacts of various potential solutions and then solve problems in a group, a la Quality Circles and 6-Sigma. 

Hats off to the folks at TechWeb for their terrific unconference. Although the first one involved only 65 (David said it was 90) people, the quality of the interaction was impressive. I liked the freewheeling participation style and the real-time definition of the actual agenda. 

Here's 10 tips that I'm following through on today. This is a starting point to working on reducing your personal carbon footprint.

1. Calculate your typical carbon footprint.

2. Walk, bicycle, take public transit, hybrid or motorcycles to work or to run errands.

3. Open the windows instead of operating fans, heating or air conditioning.

4. Drink tap water instead of bottled water (it really is clean anyways and delays the recycling of the one-time use plastic bottle).

5. Read research on being green.

6. Pay cash instead of credit card today (the computing, networking, storage, printing, mailing, bill-paying technologies in support of credit card transactions today consume electricity).

7. Video or audio conference calls instead of face-to-face meetings where one of us have to drive or travel to attend. 

8. Buy something used on eBay instead new in the store.

9. Turn off the lights in empty rooms. 

10. Plant a tree. 

Next week, I'll be attending the Energy Camp at Interop in Las Vegas. I'll also be interviewing a number of companies - DLink, Cisco, LifeSize - to understand their green claims a little better.

A big issue that a lot of green-oriented people complain about the USA is our non-ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. I have written about the treaty before and before, but this picture, from the Canadian Geographic magazine's April 2008 edition showed the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute's map of Nitrogen dixide (NiO₂) production in the troposphere (the portion of the atmosphere that we breathe). 

Otherwise observed as brownish smog, nitrogen dioxide combines with particles in the air to form the brown haze most prominently seen overhanging large urban areas. I've flown many times into Toronto Ontario and as the aircraft turns west over Lake Ontario to the final approach at Pearson, we descend through this hellish-brown haze. Yuck. I don't get or ask for window seats any more.