Efforts should be focused on stopping output of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas which helps heat the planet, rather than moving to a source that can be regenerated, said Craig Mundie, the man who replaced Bill Gates as the world’s largest software maker’s futurist.

Conservation and radical technologies, including new nuclear, could be key, he said.

“If you talk to the man on the street, there is a lot more awareness of the concept of renewable energy than there is about the need for a zero-carbon source,” said Mundie, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer, in an interview on the sidelines of a major electricity conference.

Even industry insiders were not looking hard enough at “the scarier or less understood technological approaches,” he said.

The U.S. Congress is considering a massive climate bill and nations globally are preparing to negotiate a follow up to the Kyoto climate change treaty at the end of this year. Development of solar power, wind and other ‘clean’ energy sources are hot topics globally.

But the fastest way to cut carbon output is to cut use, Mundie offered.

“The first crucial step we have to take across the board is conservation,” he said in the speech at the Edison Electric Institute after introducing software for consumers to monitor their own power use, called Hohm.

He argued that humans will need energy alternatives that can be built in large arrays quickly to meet the demands of a growing, developing planet, and saw one such possibility as nuclear.

“I’m probably more enchanted with the idea of these novel nuclear approaches than any other one technology. There’s wind, there’s solar, there’s tides, there’s geothermal, but I think each of these is going to be more challenging to harness at some very large scale,” he said, stressing that he was not giving his company’s official policy.

He referred in particular to research work on traveling-wave reactors, a technology that aims to use slow-burning reactions in waste fuel from current plants.

“I think it would be a fascinating outcome if we woke up 10 years from now and said look, you can have all the nuclear you want, it doesn’t have a weapons problem related to it, the cost of fuel is relatively low, there’s no reprocessing requirements. It would be kind of a silver bullet for the energy problem.”

Black Warrior Riverkeeper recently achieved a $150,000 settlement in a lawsuit over sedimentation from storm water runoff, one of the leading causes of impairment in Alabama’s streams and rivers. The defendants, Birmingham Airport Authority and Dunn Construction Company, were ordered to take steps to curtail construction storm water runoff polluting Village Creek, a tributary of the Black Warrior River’s Locust Fork. Part of the settlement will fund a conservation project in the Village Creek watershed.

Thomas Granito, from the Coast Guard’s environmental management office, discussed ongoing green initiatives adopted by the service in a “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable April 21.

“I have been with the Coast Guard for more than 25 years, and I’ve seen how the service is becoming greener, as is much of the rest of the world these days,” Granito said. “In the past, the Coast Guard was more concerned about maintaining compliance with federal regulations. Currently, the Coast Guard continues to shift from compliance to sustainability — basically ‘greening up’ the Coast Guard.”

Only environmental personnel participated in site cleanups in the past, Granito said, but today things are different. Changes in management, organization styles and a more responsive and flexible attitude, similar to what the Defense Department has done in recent years, have led to changes in the way the Coast Guard operates, he added.
Many of the Coast Guard’s roughly 600 facilities are going green, Granito said.

“For example, the Coast Guard Academy at New London, Conn., developed a sustainability initiatives network for recycling and using electronics and related items,” he said. “This initiative helped them win a White House award for reducing electronics materials. The Coast Guard Academy was also the first military academy to participate in a program called recycle-mania, in which colleges get together to come up with recycling initiatives.”

Granito also cited initiatives adopted at Station Emerald Isle, N.C., where recycled products such as gypsum board have been used in the station’s renovation project. This unit also has replaced traditional air-conditioning systems with more-efficient geothermal HVAC systems, he noted.

Other services have helped the Coast Guard in its search for green initiatives, Granito said.

“As far as following what some of the other agencies are doing, we’ve always got an eye out to see what they’re doing,” he said. “I know that our vessel folks are usually keyed in to what the Navy is doing, and our aviation folks are always clued in to Air Force and what they’re doing.”