My colleagues in the computer and telecommunications industry (ICT) do not seem to be engaging with the issue of climate change and energy reduction. To help them along I have organised a symposium at ANU on Friday on "Green ICT: Learning to be Sustainable with Computers and Broadband": http://tomw.net.au/moodle/course/view.php?id=10

A great initiative, Tom. Hope you attract a good roll up of people and that they go away and implement some worthwhile energy-saving measures as a result.

i am on my 5 th computer [in 4 years]

now making them costs co2
so how about making computers LAST longer

so they arnt as susseptable to failure and uploading every virus ever invented.

learning to be sustainable is a joke

i bought my first consumable [an 8 mm film projecter [and a camera]

i then got a real to real to reel tape recorder [followed by a 8 track, followed by a phylips vidio player etc [then went beta [because it was better] then went vhs
then that changed through a progressive evolution into a variaty of disc's [cd hhd formats

,wont mention i pods and walk mans

thank god i never got the phone bug because the phones are a joke

now my latest purchase is as prone to planned obsolesance
as all the other junk i bought over my consumerism[life]

of course no one warned me about buying vista , that is going to be quickly made obsolete by windows 7 [apparently]but its cccrap 2

but as you nerds got a handle on it stop internet 2

and start FORCING the servers to serve

[not restrict my downloading by slowing it down ,and giving me 404 errors [censorship]

[as for getting the hd tv , digetal; and all the assosiated new age jargon spin and consumeristic bullcccrap etc

im over it

you want sustainability make the damm things able to be serviced

get standardised formats and stop going from one consumaBLE TO THE NEXT
[bring back analog phones [and record players] ,

you can jam the rest of it
[i want a refund on my vista]

Tom, I’m going to be rather critical. I think it is a good initiative, but something doesn’t add up.

Your key questions:

1. How can the ICT industry reduce its own carbon footprint?
2. How can use of ICT help reduce Australia's Carbon footprint?
3. What role could/should ICT Professionals play in reducing Australia's Carbon Footprint?

…are entirely concerned with climate change, whereas the symposium title and your thread title refers to sustainability. There is much more to sustainability than just our carbon footprint.

I notice that your session is specifically about energy efficiency in ICT. Dr Strazdin’s session is similar. Dr Middleton’s session is about broadband infrastructure and Dr Sulaiman’s talk is about ICT energy saving.

So, it all seems to be about the first question, and to a limited extent about the second question only inasmuch as the direct energy efficiency of computer systems goes, and not at all as to how computer technology and top-quality communications networks can help us reduce our carbon footprint in all sorts of other ways (or perhaps it is indirectly within Dr Middleton’s presentation).

I’d suggest that the actual reduction or efficient consumption of energy within the computer machinery constitutes only a tiny fraction of the carbon footprint issue and that it is FAR more important for this technology to make communication and the promotion of sustainability strategies as efficient as possible.

The second and third questions are much more important than the first.

The fourth question is much much more important again; how can the use of ICT help Australia, and the planet, achieve genuine sustainability, ie, the ultimate balance between all things human, our resource base and the natural environment…and do it quickly?

And the fourth question, or anything in the symposium related to it, is…well…absent!

interestingly tom it seems the green theme has gone global

[bbc reports one in london and a few in europe [
so your question is really hypothetic isnt it ]the post wasnt 'really' asking only publisising?]

seems the computer industry just adopted the green theme
[or as bbc put it big blue turns into the big green ,
how insulting

but the sheeple gobble it up
just the latest fad [image]

dont you guys know that the refills for your printers cost more than the printer cost new
[they used to be refillable ,and toner was toner ,

now each type has its special micron of toner IT ALONE uses, in its own cart-RAGE]

the computer marketing model is a great one for getting the new model in and using the media news as free blurb pr

[while the info in the old format dosnt work in the NEW format]

i noticed long ago that certain music wasnt put into the new format[i take that as a clear sign of censure ,either sell out or your music disappears?

[or if your a hippy we will kill your music [thus kill your mission]

any how i agree with q+a
it smells like a gimmic that sells to the media trying to give us a new tax ,
aided and abetted by those seeking to limit our web acces and killing our expensive [and carbon consuming playthings ,

even needing different power supply and special batteries [that strangly hold 4 hours new but soon fall's to 2 hours , then finding the right model replacement]

recall enron [who perfected the model]
the greed is cash flow theme
its rife in the conputer industry
but who knows [notices] right [certainly not the cattle]

Thank you once again, tomw, for alerting ordinary ICT users as to the drift of Federal government policy in the ICT area. Every OLO user has, whether they know it yet or not, a vested interest in this topic. At stake are issues that will affect the very ability to continue to be able to relatively FREELY electronically communicate as we presently can.

I am gaining a sense that governments, and behind them, large corporate interests, are taking the view that ICT has enabled the ordinary computer user too much: that when users at large wise up to the true potential of existing technology and software, let alone foreseeable developments therefrom, they will exercise too much independence of mind and usage discretion.

I have not yet read Sir Peter Gershon's report (downloadable as a PDF file from a link within the site to which tomw provided a link in his opening post), but from the summary in his covering letter I am getting the sense that centralization and all that goes with it is going to result in the bureaucratic tail becoming to wag the operational and functional usage ICT dog.

Ludwig's exposition of the three, but what should be four, questions that effectively define this ICT sustainability learning initiative you propose, achieved in the fourth post to this thread, is superb. One of the best posts I have ever seen on OLO. His fifth paragraph says it all.

Some background for OLO users:

This is the link to Tom Worthington's (userID tomw) earlier OLO article 'Digital education revolution is not sustainable' published on 6 October 2008: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7984&page=0 . (I tried to get to grips with what the Federal government's 'digital education revolution' of which Tom was somewhat critical, in detail proposed, but I encountered nothing but vagueness and confusing lack of hard detail.)

This is the link to the discussion 'Reducing computer greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2020' started by tomw on 22 september 2008: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2165&page=0