Obi-Wan Kenobi and TMNT to join Green IT Week

Famed voice-over artist joins ComputersOff effort to promote Green IT

The Force and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (TMNT) will be with International Green IT Awareness week as it kicks off next week.

Or rather, the voice behind Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: The Clone Wars film and Leonardo in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles box office hit, James Arnold Taylor, will be acting as an ambassador for the week-long sustainable IT conference.

The famed voice-over artist is a self-described tech freak, especially when it comes to audio and film editing equipment, and ardent environmentalist.

“I’ve got a Pro Tools set up here in my studio and I have a booth that I had built that was entirely Green due to some environmental issues that I had,” Taylor told Computerworld Australia. “A side note, I had some toxic mould poisoning in a home that we had some years back which got me very sick. That is what kind of started my quest on finding more Green and clean ways of doing business, as well as just living.”

Now Taylor promotes environmental awareness and aims to do so as part of the ComputersOff-led International Green IT Awareness Week which runs from 1-7 June.

Green IT Week is a collaborative initiative consisting of in-person and online seminars and activities and will be hosted by ComputersOff.ORG. It will involve expert researchers, Green IT specialists, vendors and manufacturers, as well as organisations which have already successfully implemented their own Green IT initiatives.

For Taylor, one of his aims for the week is to convince people there are tangible and easy steps that can be taken to create cost savings.

“In Hollywood we have a tendency to be very vocal but we don’t always practice what we preach,” Taylor said. “That is my biggest push here, trying to get people to practice a little more what they are espousing to everybody else. For the most part people are willing to hear it and I think they are willing to give it a try. That’s why I think this Green IT Awareness week is just going to be such a great thing to do, because people are going to go, ‘I actually have something I can do’.”

The not-for-profit organisation recently launched its Green IT Awareness Week website, which provides information on the events running next week.

Several celebrities like Taylor have also supported the International Green IT Week by sharing their views on a video collaboration posted on YouTube.

The list includes Nelson Aspen, Frederic Prinz Von Anhalt, Tanna Federick and Mariah Carradine.

Australia has been ranked in the bottom half of G20 nations for its ability to use ICT to reduce CO2 emissions according to IDC's ICT Sustainability Index.

The Index, which was launched to the public at the United Nations COP15 climate change meetings in Copenhagen, found Australia could cut up to 116.6 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2020 if it used more intensive ICT solutions in the transport, industry, building, and energy generation and distribution sectors.

Overall the G20 nations – which account for over 70 per cent of all emissions – could cut CO2 emissions by 25 per cent to 2020 with 41.4 per cent of this potential existing in the Asia-Pacific region.

The countries were ranked into five tiers with Japan being the only country to achieve a Tier one ranking with a score of 16. Tier two comprised the US, France, Germany, Brazil and the UK in that order.

Australia scrapped into Tier four as the 13th ranked country behind Turkey, South Korea and China. South Africa and Indonesia received the dubious honour of the worst ranked.

In outlining Australia's results, Philip Carter, IDC associate research director for Green IT & Sustainability Research, noted smart metering could account for nine per cent of CO2 emissions reduction in the power sector while private transport optimisation could decrease emissions in that sector by five per cent.

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