I won’t pretend to have every answer. All I can speak to is what we have done as a company, and I feel it is from some level of appropriate authority as we also operate virtually spread worldwide and travel fairly extensively.

We, like you started with the small stuff: less commute times via virtual office, reducing paper wastes, electronic communication when possible, etc. These are all noble, helpful and fairly simple, so I won’t spend any time there.

Like you, or largest impact is due to travel – mainly via air, but also considering auto transport, hotel stays and the like, we could no longer ignore our, shall we say “unintended impact” that consists of ancillary items we tend not to think about even in travel.

To that end, we dialogued extensively with CarbonFund.org to really explore the impact of our travels and overall business practice. We then took it a step further and added a certain percentage to what we knew to cover for the unintended impact I mentioned.

The result was a great partnership with these fine folks that allowed us to adopt an internal program of calculating what we made, reducing what we could, and then offsetting the rest of our impact. We were allowed to allocate funds to cover emissions to initiatives of our choice, allowing us to invest in alternative energy sources, reforestation, etc., in amounts equal to offset our calculated impact.

An added bonus of this, beside the accompanying stewardship angle, is the ability to propose this behavior to others, even to the point of covering external emissions (as we are doing for a portion of the upcoming EclipseWorld conference attendees).

In summation, I’ll steal the CarbonFund.org tagline: we “reduce what we can, and offset what we can’t.” And we’re hoping others can do the same moving forward.

As a side note, to the many “man is not creating this crisis” or “carbon offsetting is a big myth” folks out there, I ask: what harm is being done by putting forth such efforts? Suppose we were to debate endlessly about the source of warming, proposed impact, etc. The key is: if it is a real issue (as I believe it is) what are you doing to step up to the plate as an individual or company? Will you simply berate others as disingenuous for attempting to do their part?

If it is not a controllable or legitimate issue in some way, what harm has been caused? Investing in wind energy, reducing emissions and pollution, reforesting our planet? Where is the harm in that? It seems we are either responsible to take action to protect our future or to improve the quality of our environment in either case.

Kudos to RedMonk and GreenMonk for stepping out boldly yet again. We look forward to bearing the fruits collectively as a community and planet as a result.

Best,
Jens Eckels
Genuitec

Second, amen to April above when she says, “it’s amazing how much behavior can be changed by setting a goal.”

I’m going to push back yet again about travel. I know that your business is built on trust with & thorough understanding of clients, and on networking your way to new clients. But I would still challenge you to take an engineer’s approach to the problem, with targets to reduce the number of flights and the number of flight miles within a certain timeframe — e.g. by 10% of each over the next six months in comparison to the past six months.

This may, by the way, offer you a better chance to educate your clients: you reinforce the importance of bit-miles versus human-travel-miles by, for example, always charging the client for travel *including offsets*, and by charging extra fo physical trips taken above a certain threshold.

In terms of work philosophy, this may lead you to a sort of mega-batch-processing over the course of the year. That is, you each spend longer continuous periods working from your home bases, then longer, more intense periods traveling, with more client engagements per mile traveled. (In fact, that could give you another metric to ponder: hours of client/networking facetime per air-mile traveled. Seek to improve the ratio my meaningful amounts during each half-year.)

Hope this helps. I’ll be interested to see what you come up with.

@Tim – thanks for the comprehensive post and like you, I’m a strong believer in the necessity of external auditing of any claims of carbon neutrality

@James – thanks, we’ll look into those

@Glen – exactly, I’d love to be able to do all conferences virtually but unfortunately that means you miss out on the networking opportunities which can be of far greater benefit than the talks themselves.

@Asa – what Glen said!!!

@April – Love the idea of virtual meetings etc. and I do lots of teleconferences but unfortunately I also have to do a lot of travel, as do the others in RedMonk. Not much way around that yet. Nortel aren’t working on a Transporter by any chance, are they?

@Jamie – As I mentioned above the travel which can’t be avoided are when giving talks at conferences or client meetings/briefings

@Glen – great reply, thanks. Personally, I work out of home, use CFLs and all my devices are on power strips so they can all be turned off at flick of a switch but then again there are all those flights!

We have got a few organisations we work with multiple international offices, and we are developing an approach to simplify the audit process for organisations that cross over international boundaries.

You see, the whole issue, as far as I see it, about greenwash is the lack of veracity or verification of claims by independent third parties.

Basically, the process with us is to work with clients to define a legally defensible, robust and transparent organisational boundary: every emission source that sits within that boundary needs to be reported.

Then, we work with the client to build the emissions inventory: the list of all of the potential sources of emissions occurring within the organisational boundary.

Following that, we switch to “audit mode” where we ask for detailed data to populate the inventory.

After that, we calculate emissions, and report on them.

Effectively, we become an “internal auditor” to do our job. In an ideal world (and maybe into the future) we would be operating as a truly independent external auditor. The thing is at present, we have to work with clients to be able to tell them the things they need to tell us.

From there, you have the emissions “number”, if you want to offset. The key here is transparency when reporting what has and has not been included in the organisational boundary as well as how you have gone about offsetting (project type, third party certification/verification of credit quality), and a clear description of your emission management plan to reduce emissions (we provide an emission management plan as part of our reporting).

I am really keen to follow this conversation on because it would be an interesting project for us to go through via long distance (all of our current clients have an Australian base at present, and have offshore operations).

Looking forward to hearing back from you, and getting to know more about where you are at and what you do! Could be some interesting synergies for us…

Cheers

tim

1. Have Stephen not attending boring baseball games and instead watch them on TV.
2. Have Stephen stop traveling from Boston to Middle America and stay in one place.
3. Have Governor and Cote provide commentary on the green aspects of the companies they cover. A little community understanding of startups is in order.
4. Offset bad Redmonk behavior by encouraging others to be charitable. Have you checked out Kiva. No business model is more eco-friendly.
5. Talk more about the behavior of conferences you attend and their habits of throwing away food that can help the poor. If you stop wasting half the food, you can cut down on carbon by almost half.

Duckdown…