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Software consultancy TG Allison, for example, which helps dairy farmers in rural Wales maximize their milk yields, has cut average weekly mileage by its employees from 200 down to 40 miles — an 80% drop — at the same time as increasing productivity and customer satisfaction. Instead of spending hours driving out to a client’s farm whenever something goes wrong, the company’s staff now use an Internet link to connect to the farm’s computers and resolve the problem, often within minutes. Many farmers are also pleased to know the company has reduced its carbon emissions, says owner Thomas Allison.

THE powerful Group of Eight developed nations have taken a cautious step towards a new global climate change deal, agreeing to a goal of at least halving world carbon emissions by 2050.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car expects a move from PCs to HP thin clients will cut energy consumption by 5 million kilowatt-hours, save about $500,000 annually, and reduce CO2 emissions by 6.5 million pounds per year, Computerworld reports. The network of more than 45,000 thin client terminals – operated through 743 terminal servers – connects Enterprise rental offices throughout the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Puerto Rico. Thin clients use only 13.6 watt-hours and 2.4 watt-hours of electricity in active and passive states, respectively, compared with the 77.1 watt-hours and 1.8 watt-hours consumed by PCs.

Only 36 per cent of the senior executives surveyed were aware the federal government's carbon trading scheme will kick into action in 2010, the Australian Institute of Management, Victoria and Tasmania, (AIM) survey found. Eighty per cent of respondents said they knew very little or were only somewhat aware of the scheme.

That is changing with the company’s relatively new corporate environmental site. One big shift in the past six months has been the focus on software as a means of controlling or affecting carbon footprints. The potential for analytics and management technology that helps businesses run scenarios to better plan around emissions, geographic concerns and data center limitations suddenly seems boundless. The other big transition that Microsoft faces, of course, is the Software as a Service (SaaS) movement, which will see its data center footprint mushroom extensively in the coming years.

India's top firms face little stakeholder pressure to combat climate change with only about 40 per cent of the companies surveyed setting voluntary carbon emissions reduction goals, a report said. A survey by KPMG consultants of 70 CEOs found their response to climate issues was driven largely by the need to comply with expected regulations, while leaving the leadership role in tackling global warming to the government.

While many companies in the developed world have measured their baseline carbon footprint and set reduction targets over 5-10 years, in India only 41 per cent of firms had some qualified reduction goals to be achieved by 2010. About 38 per cent had no such goals.

REDUCING carbon emissions will not be cost free for Australians, Kevin Rudd has bluntly declared, as he turns the heat on the Liberals to pass the Government's scheme in the Senate next year.

"The whole idea of carbon pricing is that if it doesn't hurt it won't work," he told Canberra ABC radio today. "Essentially, prices, for example for petrol as well as a whole bunch of other things, have to go up in order to encourage us to be more careful with how much we use and in order to encourage business to come up with new ways of getting it to us in ways that don't pump out greenhouse gases."

Purchasing ethanol from so far away may seem a little counter-intuitive, but Anders Fredikson, VP of Sekab, says that this sustainable ethanol will reduce CO2 emissions from farming, production and transportation to Sweden by 85% compared with petrol. Plus, mills will receive 5-10% more for their traceable product than mills that do not adhere to the sustainability guidelines. Half of the 800 million liters of ethanol consumed by Sweden per year is supplied by Brazil, so going with sustainable ethanol will make a significant impact.

The CEOs of 100 large multinational corporations -- including companies from carbon-intense industries -- have signed a World Economic Forum statement [PDF] that calls on the G8 to create a strategy to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050.

So what I propose here is that every house should have a dumb terminal that connects to broadband internet with a powerful server at the end that serve thousands, maybe hundred of thousands people. These servers, enable people to do their job at home, collaborating using teleconference, and many more. With this scheme, actual reduction of CO2 emissions can be achieved.

Well it's hardly a surprise but the Government's green paper tells us an emissions trading scheme will be costly.It will be inflationary and could push the price of electricity up by as much as 16 per cent. But to ease the pain, the Government has promised compensation for pensioners, motorists and low income households; and assistance for high emitting businesses.The Greens aren't happy, and neither is the Opposition. But the broad outlines of the Governments design to reduce carbon pollution has been welcomed by the business community.

This report applies a full-cost economics approach to climate change adaptation, using the aluminium industry as a case study to illustrate the complexity of the policy challenge. The report examines the positive value of jobs within the upstream aluminium industry, and the negative value of carbon emissions from the sector. It estimates the value which flows from aluminium jobs to individual workers and to the wider community. The report provides a demographic survey of aluminium towns and finds that aluminium towns are less economically vibrant than the Australian economy as a whole, with lower median incomes (despite high aluminium wages), lower employment and lower workforce participation. This highlights the critical importance of aluminium to these towns, employing thousands of local workers at an average wage more than double the national median.

The term cleantech therefore tends to be a more amorphous industry group than, say, environmental services, and a less rigid investment asset class than, say, financial services.Sectors that appear to fit into the definition of cleantech without dispute include:Renewable energy – wind, solar thermal and photovoltaics, wave, tidal, hydro, geothermal, biomass and biogas;Water technologies that increase efficiency;Energy efficiency, green buildings and biomaterials;Waste management and recycling;Energy storage and fuel cell technologies;Low emission vehicle technologies; andEnvironmental Services