Realistic actions, not symbols are needed for Green progress - by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 16 2010)

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   Environmental activist Bill McKibben was pulling a big stunt last week,  showing up in Washington D.C. and "trying" to gift his Carter-era solar panel back to the Obama White House last week.  (Note to Bill: People just don't show up at the White House uninvited; Shaq tried this already with no joy. If a world-class basketball player can't show up to shoot some hoops with Barak, well, let's say you're lucky you didn't spend quality time with the Secret Service...)

   McKibben, the founder of 350.org, needs to get his act together, rather than dorking around with some retro tech and a cheap PR stunt.  Maybe he could convince Greenpeace to switch its server business over to carbon-free and sustainable electricity -- there's at least one place in Iceland that fully qualifies -- rather than whining about Facebook and getting nowhere.

   "But it's the symbolism--"  The Obama administration may not want to highlight the fact that the Carter administration put solar panels on the White House thirty years ago and nobody really cried when they were ripped off and GS- surplused. Or that one of the Carter-era solar hot water panels was given to China's Himin Solar Group, the largest manufacturer of solar hot water heaters in the world.

   And if Obama really wanted solar for the White House, there are several U.S. companies that would be more than happy to provide the hardware for free.  Sungevity, a company specializing in solar panel lease deployments, estimates it can save the White House about $1610 per month in utilities.

   Needless to say, if Al Gore didn't get solar panels on the White House when he was hanging out in Washington D.C. for eight years, a drive-by stunt by McKibben is going to do little to shame the current administration into playing along.

   However, we can pull a page from Al Gore's Internet playbook to try and swing some more carbon reduction into the big picture.  During the first term of the Clinton administration, Gore's "Reinventing government" task force mandated that all executive branch agencies of the government needed to get themselves an Internet presence by the fall of 1994.   The rest, to be cliche', was history as other businesses recognized they needed to get on board for the benefits involved.

   Since the U.S. government is one of the biggest purchaser of goods and services in the world, it has a great ability to influence standards and provide a ready market, one that suppliers can use to justify bank loans and private investment money.   If the U.S. government would clearly commit to steadily buying more of its electricity from renewable providers every year for the next 5 years,  it would encourage entrepreneurs and private investors to  start creating more green renewable opportunities.   

   Purchasing electricity would also enable a free marketplace to work out what solutions would be "winners" and "losers," rather than getting the government into the dubious business of large project management - efforts that more often end up delayed and over budget.

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