[CAnet - news] Consumers control or influence 60% of CO2 emissions

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
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[I highly recommend a report by Confederation of British Industry titled
"Climate Change:  Everyone's Business". There is a number of excellent
statistics and charts on GHG (Green House Gas) emissions. But the one that
struck me the most significant is the fact that consumers control or
influence 60% of CO2 emissions.  Emissions under direct consumer control
such as home heating, private car transportation and personal electric
consumption constitute 35%. Consumer influenced sectors such as retail, food
and drink, agriculture etc constitute another 25%.

Finding ways to encourage consumers to reduce their carbon footprint will
have a dramatic impact on overall global GHG emissions. Past attempts at
such a strategy have focused on efforts like smart meters, tele-commuting or
tele-presence.  Although these continue to be worthwhile initiatives, they
suffer in their appeal due to  externalities such as basic inconvenience,
insufficient broadband bandwidth and lack of incentive to counter the
clearly inferior technique of interacting with colleagues and workers.

On the other hand, one of the outstanding success of the Internet over the
past decade has been the growth in electronic products and services such as
music, film, advertising , photography  on line searches and so on.  Many
business processes are also moving to the Internet through such applications
as Service Oriented Architecture  (SOA) and Web 2.0 applications.  The
portion of the economy dedicated to e-products and e-services is expected to
grow significantly over the coming years. Already multi-billion companies
have been built around this business model such as Google, Apple iTunes, etc


Therefore, as I have argued in the past, one area of possible innovation and
economic opportunity is to "mash up" these two separate economies and
business models to see if new applications and services can be developed to
encourage consumers to reduce their own GHG emissions.  Companies like
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Amazon, and eBay, with their close consumer
relationships could possibly  have a significant impact on CO2 emissions
through exchanging their e-products and e-services for consumer reduction in
carbon.  This is not "pie in the sky" thinking but a common marketing tool
that already exists with resale gas and electric companies. But surprisingly
the concept has not been taken up or implemented by the Internet industry.
-- BSA]

Climate Change: Everyone's Business
http://www.avtclient.co.uk/climatereport/



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