Green journalism….

With the exception of The Guardian, the national newspapers are pretty poor at covering technology stories. Even when an organisation has splashed out for an advertising-led ‘special report,’ the effort made is sub-minimal.

Witness The Times on Monday and its ‘Carbon Champions’ double page spread. Funded by the Carbon Trust, which is funded by tax-payers, all six articles are outsourced to the same freelancer. Standards are bound to slip when that much pressure is put on one person, and it seems they did.

One of the representatives of the "UK corporate leaders group on climate change," Richard Barrington, talks of there being two CEOs in the future. One is the traditional CEO, the other is a chief energy officer.

If that hasn’t got "cheap PR soundbite” written all over it, check out the follow-on quote: “Barrington says that the UK could reduce CO² emissions by 3 million tons simply by persuading government departments to replace millions of energy-consuming PCs with “thin clients”, simpler machines with access to shared services, which is all many civil servants require.”

Richard Barrington’s day job? Working at Sun Microsystems flogging thin clients….