Google: Official Tree Hugger

Show me a good corporate environmental citizen and I'll show you a company that is more concerned about cutting costs or saving money by eliminating waste from its processes than it is about melting Arctic ice floes. This is not a criticism. As a motivator of human behavior, short-term payback trumps long-range fear any day of the week. We all love our grandchildren, but what the heck. The emergence of Google as the New York Times says the "best guess" is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. Reducing the costs of energy by producing some of its own needs not only earns Google valuable praise from an increasingly environment-aware public but it cuts real costs from the bottom line. Even if it succeeds in reducing its energy costs by only a few percent, the dollar savings will be enormous. There are skeptics, of course. The not-quite-as-clever-as-it-thinks philanthropic arm as a real business rather than the usual underachieving charity, this approach to good environmental citizenship shows just how powerful Google has become at changing the way the corporate social compact game is played. Bookmark Murdok: Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

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