Top executives from some of Canada’s largest corporations issued a statement today that urged the federal governent and attendees of the UN Conference on Climate Change in Montreal to “act urgently to stabilize the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and minimize the global impacts of climate change.”

The statement, titled “A Call to Action on Climate Change and Energy,” was prepared at the request of Prime Minister Paul Martin to show that Canada’s business community is committed to developing a sustainable development strategy that will take us to 2050 and beyond. They also took the opportunity to describe the actions they are taking to battle climate change.

“Where possible, we are adapting our business practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to minimize the adverse impact of climate change. Some of us are major users and producers of energy, and have launched emission reduction programs and participate in emissions trading markets. We believe that purchasing and producing renewable energy, investing in low carbon technologies, working to improve energy efficiency and offering new products and services aimed at reducing emissions are meaningful strategies for the business community to undertake. Many of us have improved company productivity and profitability as a result.”

Among their recommendations is that “a more effective global effort must rapidly increase deployment of low-carbon, zero-emitting, renewable energy carbion dioxide capture and storage, conservation and energy efficiency technologies.”

They urge governments and industry to, “On an urgent basis, target strategic investments and incentives in world-class carbon dioxide capture, transport and storage and low-impact renewable energy, including green power, green heat and bio-refineries and advanced biofuels.”

Signatories to this statement are some of the Who’s Who of corporate Canada, including André Demarais, president and co-CEO of Power Corp., Clive Mather, president and CEO of Shell Canada, and Laurent Beaudoin, CEO of Bombardier Inc.

The heads of Falconbridge Ltd., Home Depot Canada, Desjardins Group, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company, Alcan Inc. and BC Hydro were also part of the group.

This is just another example — on top of individual announcements of Sun, GE, Ford and others — of how serious corporations are beginning to take the issue of sustainability, and how aggressive investment in clean energy and clean technologies are being put forward as a major answer to the problem.

But it’s more than just sustainability on its own. It’s profitable sustainability. Competitive sustainability. Corporations are issuing challenges to others and themselves because they realize the issue of climate change can be tackled without sabotaging the economic equation.

For another take, the Toronto Star has an article in Friday’s paper. Here’s a link to a version from the Globe and Mail.

Here’s a Wired.com update on the Sterling Energy projects I wrote about back in August. The article speaks for itself, but basically the projects are moving forward and the first phase — a 1 megawatt test site using 40 solar collector dishes — is expected to be complete by spring 2007. When the entire projects are complete, two utilities who are partnering with Sterling will be capable of generating a total of 800 megawatts of electricity for the California market. These projects alone would be bigger than all U.S. projects to date combined, and backers of the systems say the power that’s produced will be cost-competitive with fossil-fuel powered plants. Important to note is that the technology is not based on solar PV technology, but rather on solar collectors that concentrate sunlight to create heat that spins turbines drives piston engines.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy, other than when he’s Microsoft bashing. I’ve had the pleasure — displeasure? — of interviewing him once, and didn’t find him to be the most friendly fellow. Perhaps it was just a bad day. He’s also the guy who said “You have zero privacy. Get over it,” which as a privacy advocate I found a tad annoying… but I digress.

I was intrigued, however, with an opinion piece he recently wrote for CNET’s News.com, and Sun’s announcement on Monday that it is committed to “eco-responsibility” in the design of its computing products, or what it also refers to as “sustainable computing.” This all coincided with the launch of the company’s new energy-efficient UltraSPARC T1 processor, which before launch was codenamed “Niagara.”

Sounds like Sun is hopping on the bandwagon that General Electric, Ford and Toyota are driving. And that’s a good thing — a solid sign that the move toward clean technologies is gaining momentum, profile and legs.

In a nutshell, McNealy wrote that the computing industry needs to do a better job of making its hardware more energy efficient. Claiming that Sun’s servers use one-third the power of many rival systems and do 50 per cent more work, he issued a challenge to competitors to try to do better with their products.

He also raised this interesting point: “None of them carry the Energy Star label, by the way, because there’s no such thing for servers. There certainly should be, though. After all, a good server is always on, unlike your washer and dryer.”

If you think about massive data centres running these machines 24-hours a day, you realize there’s money to be saved — and associated environmental gains for reducing electricity consumption — by buying the most efficient hardware on the market. “So if the chief information officer isn’t calculating the cost of electricity into his purchasing decisions, the company may as well be burning money,” says McNealy.

He says the same thinking applies to desktop computing. Why, he asks, use a fully loaded, more power-hungry desktop computer when most of the applications can be delivered to an energy-efficient “thin client” — i.e. a so-called network appliance — that can access all its computing applications from a server through a broadband connection?

“Consider the typical office PC,” he writes. “It uses about 300 watts of electricity and pumps out about 850 British thermal units, or BTUs, of heat. It’s not really an efficient space heater, though, and in warm weather it makes your AC work overtime.”

By comparison, he says a thin client has no microprocessor, no disk drive, no cooling fan, and as a result only uses 15 watts of electricity. And here’s the kicker: “This computing paradigm has reduced our power consumption by nearly nine times and raw materials consumption by 150 times while saving us $25 million in energy and systems cost last year alone,” he claims.

Now, I can’t verify those numbers but you’ve got to assume McNealy has done his homework. All I can say is it’s about time that somebody has raised the issue of computer power efficiency and network computing designs that can reduce energy consumption.

Funny, McNealy has been trying to sell the idea of the thin client “network appliance” — or the “network as the computer” — since my years as a technology trade journalist in the mid-1990s. It never gained as much traction as it should have, and the fact is most corporate desktops have computers loaded with bloated Microsoft and other applications people hardly use. Perhaps, put in the perspective of eco-friendly computing, McNealy can revive this paradigm by getting corporate and government buyers of information technology to consider the energy impact of their purchases.

Like him or not, McNealy is blunt with his opinions and knows how to grab the media’s attention. I expect his next rant will focus on how energy-intensive the average Microsoft-loaded PC operates. It’s a debate that needs to take place.

In Sun’s announcement on Monday, the company said it is launching a series of high-level conferences to engage industry and government leaders in support of Eco-Responsibility, with the first conference scheduled for Jan. 31, 2006 in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The conference will “focus on innovative ways to reduce energy use in the enterprise servers that power the world’s computers.”

According to Sun’s chief technology officer, Greg Papadopoulos, “energy efficiency is a competitive advantage in the automotive industry and in the markets for everything from airplanes to refrigerators. It’s high time we bring the same focus and competitive zeal — the same level of responsibility to the environment — to our industry.”

The company outlines its eco-responsibility initiative in more detail in a special area of its Web site. For a different take on this, check out Joel Makower’s blog.

A few entries from other blogs I wanted to point out today.

Joel Makower has a quick entry about how (North) Americans have short memories. Despite high gas prices this summer and earlier reports that SUV sales were in trouble, it’s being reported now that interest in SUVs is on the rise again. Doh! It seems that drivers just don’t get it. The latest easing of oil/gasoline prices is part of a pattern that can be best described as two-step-back, one-step-forward. If you want to see that trend charted, check out The Energy Blog, which makes it very clear in a link to an oil price chart that oil prices are going to continue to rise.

The Energy Blog has a couple of other interesting entries — one on the launch of China’s new polycrystalline silicon production facility, which I touched on myself in an earlier entry. This will make China much more competitive in the solar PV space, and free it from dependence on U.S., Japanese and German companies that handle most silicon production in the world today. The other entry is on GE Energy and its high hopes in the wind power and clean coal (integrated gasification combined cycle) markets.

A few entries from other blogs I wanted to point out today.

Joel Makower has a quick entry about how (North) Americans have short memories. Despite high gas prices this summer and earlier reports that SUV sales were in trouble, it’s being reported now that interest in SUVs is on the rise again. Doh! It seems that drivers just don’t get it. The latest easing of oil/gasoline prices is part of a pattern that can be best described as two-step-back, one-step-forward. If you want to see that trend charted, check out The Energy Blog, which makes it very clear in a link to an oil price chart that oil prices are going to continue to rise.

The Energy Blog has a couple of other interesting entries — one on the launch of China’s new polycrystalline silicon production facility, which I touched on myself in an earlier entry. This will make China much more competitive in the solar PV space, and free it from dependence on U.S., Japanese and German companies that handle most silicon production in the world today. The other entry is on GE Energy and its high hopes in the wind power and clean coal (integrated gasification combined cycle) markets.