In his blog on Thursday, ITI’s Dean Garfield quoted comments made by Google’s Eric Schmidt at the “How Green Is the Internet?” summit that we attended that day.  Now, you can view Eric’s full comments as well as all the plenary remarks from the event.  They are here, along with a two-minute overview video that gives testimony to the energy and intelligence that permeated the event.    We also produced [...]

Technology is a transformative force for good, and must be harnessed toward the challenge of environmental sustainability.  That is the reality of the moment as well as the opportunity for the future that we focused on today at “How Green Is the Internet,” held at Google’s Mountain View campus. There are two things that jump out at me coming away from the session.  One is the unique power and ability [...]

How green is the Internet?  That’s a great question.   Not coincidentally, it’s also the name of a summit meeting today at Google headquarters.  (You can watch live at www.youtube.com/googlegreen.) Participants make up an intriguing mix of experts from industry, academia, government and NGOs.   For our part, ITI is helping to explore emerging questions around the environmental impacts and benefits [...]

Back in July 2011, as the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee marked up and approved S. 1000, the Shaheen/Portman bill on energy efficiency, I couldn't get excited.  Why?  It was abundantly clear that the bill had no chance of enactment.  With the 2012 election already looming, there was no momentum behind bipartisan energy legislation, even in the noncontroversial, low-hanging fruit area of [...]

Following a 394-1 vote two weeks ago by the House of Representatives to pass the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act, the Senate began looking at this issue this week with a hearing in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.  This is a promising sign for an issue that will affect numerous domestic industries if Congress does not act by the end of this fiscal year.  Helium is a [...]

43 years ago, the United States created Earth Day -- and 20 million Americans worked to reshape our environment from one where air pollution was a price of doing business to one where clean air and clean water were considered valuable legacies to be protected and enhanced.  Today, it is a moment to look at the modern challenges we all face -- and the cutting-edge solutions that will drive our ability [...]

Under a beautiful blue sky in the Rose Garden this morning, President Obama laid out the three key questions that drove the priorities in his just-released Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget: “How do we make America a magnet for new jobs?  How do we give our workers the skills they need to do those jobs?  And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” Some of the key initiatives put forward [...]

Open, balanced and transparent standards are a critical part of the electronics industry, allowing manufacturers to develop parts that easily connect and interact with each other; better manage materials information in the supply chain; use uniform testing methods to determine regulatory compliance, and even develop the best way to display electronic pictures and videos.  More recently, standards have [...]

Almost 10 years ago, members of the technology industry joined with colleagues from U.S. EPA, the business and government purchasing community, and environmental non-profits to develop a consistent way to measure sustainability attributes of computers and monitors.  The results of that work were twofold:  the IEEE 1680 standard, which established product criteria, and the related EPEAT program, which [...]

Last summer the U.S. EPA and ITI jointly convened a road-mapping workshop on the ENERGY STAR program.   Both groups recognize the unique nature of information and communication technologies (ICT) -- their complexity, their rapid evolution, their global nature, and their interplay with so many other products in the emerging “network of things.”  And, consequently, we both saw value in co-hosting an [...]