CANARIE's Chief Research Officer Bill St. Arnaud has triggered a global "buzz" with his new blog, urging urgent action and innovative solutions to deal with the growing environmental impact of Information Communication Technologies (ICT).

St. Arnaud, whose CANARIE listserv reaches up to 50,000 people around the world, is one of Canada's foremost authorities on advanced network technologies, credited for developing the concept of user-controlled lightpaths", for instance, an innovative way of allowing users to marshal large bandwidth for specific projects, being adopted in many parts of the world.

It's no surprise then that when St. Arnaud set his sights on the topic of reducing the environmental impact of ICT technologies - a growing area of concern among technologists - that many more people are starting to take notice, especially since the launch of his Green Broadband blog.

"I have simply been overwhelmed with the response to my blog. It has generated interest worldwide and I am now working with a number of initiatives who have adopted some of the ideas in my blog," he says.

A recent blog entry, for instance, reports that one small computer server generates as much carbon dioxide as a SUV with a fuel efficiency of 15 miles per gallon. He draws attention to "The Inefficient Truth", a comprehensive report and call to action from the UK's Environmental IT Leadership Team.

The future of public broadband infrastructure, he argues, "is not only about Internet for the masses ... it's also about building network architectures and business models that help reduce carbon dioxide emissions."

"Building the fastest and best supercomputer regardless of its environmental impact is simply not an option any more. Universities and computing science researchers should be playing a leading role in identifying new cyber-infrastructure solutions which not only address their research requirements but also take into account the carbon emission impact of these facilities," he says.

"Virtual servers have much higher energy efficiency ratio than stand-alone servers operating at most of Ontario's universities," he says.

He suggests looking at deploying energy efficient grids, sharing under-used computational facilities, or utilizing virtual computing is a better answer than building a physical cyber-infrastructure facility at every campus.

The ICT industry especially at our universities is in the best position of any sector to reduce its carbon footprint to nearly zero and beyond.

Research and education networks in particular can help reduce emissions by re-engineering network architectures and deploying applications and services to encourage others to use the Internet in novel ways in order to minimize their own carbon footprint.

The Green Broadband blog originally started as a small side project St. Arnaud was working on outside of CANARIE. It grew out of the Green Broadband Pilot initiative on which he has been collaborating with business and associates in Ottawa to develop a plan to underwrite the costs of fibre to the home in Ottawa.

"I came up with the idea of paying for the fibre through a premium on the gas and electric bill," says St. Arnaud. "I have been working with energy resellers and fibre companies on devising a business plan to deploy this fibre network. We started to realize that this idea of underwriting the cost of the fibre as a premium on the gas and electric bill had a much wider potential in addressing the larger issue of global warming."

R&E networks, he says, can play several roles in helping reduce the ICT industry's carbon footprint.

They can at as brokers and facilitators to negotiate sale of carbon offsets for a variety of carbon reducing activities of trading "bits and bandwidth for carbon". They can also deploy new Internet architectures that reduce or eliminate carbon emissions from the network equipment itself or from the deployment of cyber-infrastructure at our universities.

"I have always felt that R&E networks should be ahead of the commercial networks in terms of deploying new architectures or business models."

Some of the big players are already in the game. Some companies, like IBM, are offering carbon offset dollars (up to $1 million) equivalent to the carbon emission reductions that incur when an organization moves to a virtual environment. Cisco Systems' Connected Urban Initiative is an action plan offering funds to help find solutions of mitigating global warming.

St. Arnaud is bringing his message to international audiences. He suggested - in a recent presentation in Belgium, "Saving the Planet at the Speed of Light" - that R&E networks and university CIOs, for instance, can play a major leadership role in experimenting and deploying e-infrastructure that minimize carbon footprints.

"CANARIE, ORION and the RANs pioneered the concept of customer owned networks and lightpaths. We now have an opportunity once again in leading the world in finding solutions to the biggest challenge of our generation and of this decade."

Triggering a broader discussion and agreement among the R&E community in Canada that that this is a good idea to pursue, would be a good first step, he says.

To read Bill St. Arnaud's blog, go to http://green-broadband.blogspot.com.