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BusinessGreen Blog

News for organisations that want to reduce the environmental impact of their information technology operations

The Week in Green: How to avoid the "Starberks syndrome"October 9

The whole capitalist system is teetering on the brink, Gordon Brown's recall of Peter "Mandy" Mandelson represents the last throw of the dice, the Tories have reversed everything they stand for and are calling for a halt to executive bonuses, it looks like Spurs could get relegated, and if needs must you could always cobble together a story on asylum seekers or Kerry Katona's kids.

So what does the good old Sun choose to run as its front page splash on Monday morning? An expose on Starbucks' policy of leaving a tap running behind its counters to clean utensils.

It is hard to imagine that even six months ago a story about a company wasting water would represent a front page story anywhere, let alone in a tabloid. But The Sun obviously thinks its readers are now sufficiently interested in environmental issues to justify such a splash - and even if they aren't, they are probably interested in the paper's official green Page 3 girl, Keeley Hazell.

The immediate aftermath of The Sun splash - which saw The Guardian and the BBC pick up the story, and environment secretary Hilary Benn issue statement rebuking Starbucks - suggests the paper was right.

Looking closer at the story it is possible to feel a smidgen of sympathy for Starbucks, or "Starberks" as the inimitable Sun dubbed the company.

It was a classic hatchet job, and the already much

The Week in Green: Poisoned chalice or keys to the kingdom?October 3

"Hallelujah", was one response. "Fantastic," another. "It makes perfect sense," added a third.

At a time when many within the green business movement had all but given up lobbying for a more cohesive joined up approach to tackling climate change, the prime minister blind-sided everyone by announcing the formation of a new Department for Climate Change and Energy.

The move will inevitably be overshadowed by the Lazarus-like cabinet return of Peter Mandelson - he of the two previous cabinet resignations, undisclosed home loan, and "prince of darkness" epithets.

But in the long term it is the creation of the new climate change and energy ministerial brief that could prove the most significant and enduring legacy of Brown's first major reshuffle.

It is easy to see why many green business groups will be so delighted at the decision.

For years anyone attempting to deal with Whitehall on green matters has had to navigate the at times brutal turf war between the department for business, enterprise and regulatory reform (BERR) and Defra.

Primarily through their differing approaches to energy policy, but also as a result of the ideological differences that exist between one department set up to cut regulation and another tasked with protecting the environment, the two departments with the greatest responsibility for tackling climate c

BusinessGreen.com goes all Web TVSeptember 29

The phrase eating your own dog food always conjures up some pretty unpleasant images, but that is exactly what BusinessGreen.com will be doing tomorrow afternoon at 3pm GMT with the live broadcast of its inaugural web seminar.

Regular readers will know that we have written plenty of articles advocating the adoption of web and video conferencing systems, and now we are getting down and dirty with the technology ourselves through a live interactive web broadcast entitled Is your IT department ready for the green red tape?

Broadcast in association with IBM, the seminar will feature three exclusive presentations on how upcoming environmental legislation will impact your business, and more specifically your IT department, as well as interactive audience polls and the opportunity to put your questions to our panel of experts.

We've got a great line up of expert speakers in place with Kate Levick from the Carbon Disclosure Project providing an update the new green legislation that will affect UK firms in the coming years; IT analyst Andy Lawrence of the 451 Group explaining how carbon reporting software and more energy efficient systems will be essential to complying with such legislation; and Mick Walker, a green computing consultant with IBM's Systems and Technology Group, outlining some of the existing technologies that can aid green compliance efforts.

The Week in Green: Time to get insulatedSeptember 26

Yesterday, I had my now annual flirtation with nihilism after sitting through a truly terrifying presentation on the latest climate change science.

Back in 2006 it was Al Gore giving me nightmares with an Inconvenient Truth, last year I caught Robert Watson, former chief scientist at the World Bank and now a scientific advisor at Defra, delivering a keynote address that made Gore's slide show seem gloriously optimistic, and yesterday it was the turn of Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum and former head of the British Antarctic Survey, to give a speech that made me want to rush home, draw the curtains and curl up under the duvet clutching a bottle of scotch.

Like many scientists, Rapley is not one for the fire and brimstone. Instead, he delivered his facts in a measured manner, which allowed the gravity of what he was saying to hit home all the harder.

In a nutshell, Rapley spent 40 minutes explaining why the threat from climate change is much, much worse than climate scientists first thought and why action to address the problem is taking place far too slowly.

He may have finished on an upbeat note, quoting JFK's famous assertion that, "Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man", but it was hard to share this optimism when it followed a graph showing that both temperatures and carbon emissions are rising faster than climate models predicted.

In short, the worst case scenarios keep getting

The Week in Green: They say the darkest hour comes just before the dawnSeptember 19

I think it was the Canadian novelist and chronicler of the modern condition Douglas Coupland who once explained how he started each day by perusing the papers in the newsagent, in the knowledge that as long as no more than three front pages were covering the same story it had been a pretty good day.

By that reckoning it has been a bloody awful week. There has only been one story in town as everyone tries to get their head round the financial crisis gripping the world's markets. From Meltdown Monday to Woeful Wednesday, the headline writers at least have been enjoying themselves.

In five short days, we have all become more familiar than any of us ever wanted to be with concepts such as derivatives, short selling and moral hazard; while the economics reporters and journalists who are usually confined to a few pages near the sports section have emerged blinking into the light, clearly taking a bit too much pleasure in their new found profile.

One of the more interesting aspects of the whole sorry mess is the sight of everyone desperately casting round for a consensus. In the past 24 hours alone you could find respected commentators who would support any one of these positions, sometimes all at once: It's the speculators fault, it's the lenders fault, it's the regulators fault; the worst of the blood letting has finished, it has only just begun; this is a crisis of capitalism, it illustrates the health of capitalism; the "real economy" will ride out t