Tim Flannery Praises Green IT
Tim Flannery Praises Green IT
May 25, 2007: Climate Change activist and Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has reiterated his criticisms of the Australian Government’s stance on climate change, but believes when it comes to IT, the industry has taken a progressive stance on the issue across the globe.
“We’ve been dragging our feet on this issue for too long,” he said. “The excuses we’ve come up with around the world have been pretty pitiful.”
Flannery compared the Australian Government’s stance with the approach to the issue in California, which has been heavily backed by the IT sector. “California has taken a very progressive position on climate,” he said. “A significant part of that has been driven by the attitude in Silicon Valley. They’re really pushing this issue, and they’re showing it can be profitable.”
One vendor proving the profitability of more ‘eco-friendly’ solutions is IBM and in particular, their FileNet P8 platform assisting organisations streamline carbon hungry processes and eliminate printing waste through enterprise content management.
Flannery made his comments at a breakfast event hosted by Renewtek, the first Australia IT organisation to go ‘carbon neutral’ under the Australian Greenhouse Friendly programme. With IBM representatives also present at the event, Renewtek said IBM’s Filenet P8 platform has been one of their greatest assets going forward on meeting their carbon cutting commitments.
Flannery used the event to again hit out at the Federal Government’s continued refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and outlined the drastic consequences of melting icesheets in both the Greenland ice-cap and the Antarctic. “The rise in seas levels over the last six years have been more than originally projected,” he said. “There is enough vulnerable ice on our planet that could significantly melt in our lifetime to raise sea-levels by metres.”
As industrialised nations find ways to adapt to climate change, Flannery urged citizens to consider how poorer nations will face environmental changes. “The historic burden of Greenhouse gases comes as the result of the Industrial Revolution that delivered an inevitable lifestyle, but about 100 parts per million C02 too much,” he said. “Our cost is a straight moral transaction.”
At the Sydney function this week, Renewtek talked up their journey towards becoming the first Australian IT firm to receive Greenhouse Friendly certification from the Federal Government’s Greenhouse Friendly Initiative. Renewtek’s Chairman Neil Perry put his team through the arduous process of monitoring all emissions to determine just how much the business produced, then sought new technologies and processes to reduce these emissions, and embark on tree planting programmes to offset what could not be eliminated.
“Our carbon neutral qualification has definitely opened more doors for us with companies that are looking become sustainable,” said Perry. “Many of them ask us how we achieved it so quickly and it’s a powerful point to say that it was assisted by using systems such as FileNet.”
In Australia, Flannery believes our desperate water situation is reason enough to back green initiatives. “I’m convinced that warming of the pacific region is primarily responsible for the shift in El Nino,” he said. “Water is also part of this global phenomenon, and it is intimately tied to climate change.”
“If we think big on this issue, I believe we can get pretty far. In 10 – 20 years, this could be huge and we could well be on the way to something like the Montreal Protocol,” he said.