What shade of green are top CEOs?

Let's see: seasick green. That would be Red (really) Cavaney, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute: "I think there's no question that there is going to be some successor fuel to oil and gas. The issues is that the transition, for which nobody knows the duration, be managed...[Ethanol] is going to play an important role, but it's got to be a longer transition..."

Envy green: "The U.S. ambassador to Sweden is raising money for Swedish companies -- and the U.S. is glad he's doing so." (Okay, so to call it "envy" is cynical; let's make it envoy.)

Forest green: Jim Jungwirth, CEO of Jefferson State Forest Products is the poster boy. "The same movement that drove towns like Hayfork, Calif. to the brink of collapse is now giving them a second chance at life."

And of course, money green: John Doerr, partner in VC firm Kleiner, Perkins: "The internet market, $100 billion or so; the energy market, $6 trillion. This is the mother of all markets."

--From The Wall Street Journal's special section drawn from its Eco-nomics conference.

Look out! If the Wall Street Journal is on the scene, someone will make some money!

Of course, it's hardly news to readers of The Wall Street Journal or other publications that there's gold in them thar green hills. Nevertheless, it must warm the cold black hearts of bankers and financiers everywhere ((it's a geojoke if you've seen the sculpture on B of A Plaza, San Francisco) to see a special section devoted to the topic:
"The push to curb global-warming emissions is starting to redraw the industrial landscape, and in doing so it has already begun to create new winners and loserhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Job One for a CEO: Exploit the opportunities and shift the costs to someone else."

I have a feeling that you don't need to be a subscriber to read it online: Environmental Capital.

Greening IT: it's more than virtualization

Although that looks to be a big chunk of the solution.

Information Week (Dec.17/24, 2007 -- I know, I know, I dig into my reading stack without regard to the arrow of time) refers to studies by Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that estimate energy use of servers doubled from 2000 to 2005, reaching parity with all residential TVs, requiring 14 1,000 megawatt powerplants. By 2010, add another 10.

So what's being done? In the same issue, the cover story is Innovators & Influencers, a list which goes beyond the "usual suspects." One of them is Larry Vertal, senior strategist for Advanced Micro Devices, and head of the Green Grid consortium of IT companies, many of them fierce rivals.

Virtualization has only been implemented on 2% of the world's servers. One subtle change that will help drive conservation in the server rooms: charging the electricity they consume to the IT budget! That will concentrate the CIO's attention.