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IT COULD BE AN AVALANCHE THAT’S EXPLODED down a chute near Ashcroft, in the mountains of Central Colorado. Or a climber with a broken leg stranded at 11,000 feet on Capitol Peak. Maybe this time it’s a hiker, disoriented and lost in the cold, dark night—a hiker who could be anywhere on a grid of dozens of square miles.
But there’s one thing that’s certain, says Christina Page: “You don’t know what you’re going to get when that pager goes off.” During her seven years at RMI, Page was an active member of Mountain Rescue Aspen—helping dozens of hikers and skiers out of difficult, even life-threatening situations.
This deep concern for her fellow humans, her ability to face critical situations head on, and her fearlessness in tackling the “unknown,” extends to her life’s work as well. Page talks about the “view from 30,000 feet,” a metaphor for looking at the big picture. And from that height she’s focused in on the some of the most serious problems facing our technology-driven society from her new position at one of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies.
To most of us, the Internet represents a huge breakthrough in progress and sustainability. We no longer have to labor in longhand, use up paper, pay for postage, and bide time while a gas-guzzling jet carries our information across the country. A few electrons slip effortlessly through wires and, presto! Our communications arrive instantaneously.
All it takes is to boot up, launch a browser, type in an address, and, before you know it, you’re sending email, reading news, or looking at a friend’s online photo album.
But for Page, now Director of Climate and Energy Strategy at Yahoo! Inc., the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet company, all those services have a physical and environmental impact to consider. And the challenge for this forward- thinking company stems from the sheer volume of its activities. Yahoo! reaches 500 million people around the world. From data centers to office space to employee air travel, Yahoo! consumes energy that emits greenhouse gases while providing its search, news aggregation, email, and other tools to users.
But behind that obvious fact, the company and its employees all share a core belief and a set of core values. As Page points out, “from the cofounders to the accountants, to the legal department to the amazing engineers who design and run the data centers, the importance of energy efficiency and reducing waste to this company and the entire industry is a no-brainer.” As a result, the company pledged to go climate neutral, and it achieved that goal in 2007 by purchasing offsets against its entire annual carbon footprint—250,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions.
That’s comparable to powering down the Las Vegas Strip for two months each year.
This bold start is only part of a long-term strategy. Page, who has been with Yahoo! for the past year, is devising even better ways of measuring the company’s greenhouse-gas emissions, figuring out how to reduce them, and helping the company make responsible decisions about how to offset the rest.
Her first day on the job was spent on an airplane, flying down to Brazil. “I didn’t even have a computer or business card,” she recalls. Once there, she and a colleague looked at a number of small, run-of-river hydroelectric projects in remote wilderness areas. Yahoo! is committed to purchasing offsets that meet rigorous standards and are in parts of the world where it has a presence. Any offset the company buys is thoroughly vetted by third-party sources.
Things have barely slowed down since her whirlwind start at Yahoo! more than a year ago. Corporate sustainability programs are bursting onto the scene across almost all disciplines, yet they are still fairly young ventures charting brand-new waters.
“It’s all moving so fast. I got used to drinking from a fire hydrant while at RMI, but this is a whole different fire hydrant,” she says with a smile.
Hitting the ground running is exactly her style, though. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Page spent seven years at RMI, rotating through the Institute’s consulting practices, working with corporate clients on sustainability strategies and helping utilities with energy efficiency and greenhouse gas management. At one point, she taught a semester-long course on Natural Capitalism at Peking University in China.
“Her experience at RMI is one of the first things that stood out for us,” says Meg Garlinghouse, Senior Director of Yahoo! for Good, the company’s social responsibility arm, and one of the people Page reports to. “In addition to coming from one of—if not the most prominent environmental organization in the U.S.—she also had extensive experience working with corporations. She understands that you can’t just create a solution in an intellectual vacuum.”
For her own part, the Wellesley, Massachusetts, native credits RMI for teaching her to look at problems from a whole-system approach and spot the opportunities. At Yahoo!, that means working with staff across the company to understand the biggest leverage points. When pressed to compare the two companies even further, Page’s trademark wit surfaces, “There’s a lot of spirit of creative collaboration here like there is at RMI,” she says, “but here it’s computer geeks not efficiency geeks.”
According to Page, electricity consumption is by far the largest contributor to the company’s carbon footprint. Some of Yahoo!’s most energy-intensive facilities are data centers, buildings that store and process the vast amounts of information that make services like Flickr possible. According to a recent EPA study, the data center industry as a whole doubled in size from 2001 to 2006. If past trends continue, energy use in the sector would nearly double again by 2011.
Getting a handle on Yahoo!’s energy use and figuring out creative ways to reduce it is key to Page’s climate strategy. But it’s also key to Yahoo!’s corporate strategy. In June, she organized a meeting with the company’s cofounders, Jerry Yang and David Filo. “At the highest level…there’s a really acute under- standing of how, if you use your servers more efficiently, if you eliminate servers that are under-utilized, if you figure out ways to code more efficiently, it’s good for the bottom line, it’s good for your reliability, it’s good for your capital costs, good for reducing your operating expenditures,” says Page. “Before you even get to the greenhouse-gas aspect of it there is an understanding that this is good for the company.”
One of Yahoo!’s newest data centers, in Washington state, is designed to be passively cooled three-quarters of the year. The savings on energy will drop straight to the bottom line, says Page. More importantly, though, Yahoo! is sharing its ideas with other firms in the industry, hoping that through partnerships and collaboration they can come up with better solutions, faster.
Page is the first to admit the challenges her company faces are significant. “This is a strategy that works well in the mid-term,” she says of the company’s current offset program. Going forward, she’s confident that in another two or three years, she’ll have an even wider array of options for mitigating or offsetting Yahoo!’s carbon footprint. This could involve anything from advances in computing efficiency to breakthroughs in data center design.
If there’s anyone who’s well prepared to face an unknown future and tackle a complex challenge, it’s Christina Page. “Mathematically and scientifically [climate change] is a really daunting problem,” she says. “But one of the things I got from my time at RMI was to recognize how important and urgent the problem was—then get back to work.”
