The long carbon tail

Over the last few years there has been quite of discussion of the long tail of retail (a model on low volume sales of highly diversified products by Chris Anderson) and how the Internet helped to make this a viable business.

Now in the carbon world, there is (and rightly so) the focus on the heavy emitters and the products, which have the largest energy consumption. When I was visiting Cambridge University's Julian Woodall this morning, we re-confirmed this approach.

But there is certainly a long tail of companies with products and services which have a low to medium carbon footprint and by smaller companies which are still heavy emitters. These companies are the long tail of the carbon world and they are not subject to reductions schemes like the EU ETS.

Nevertheless these companies represent in sum a large chunk of the total global footprint. The question is if the Internet (and software solutions) can help these long tail companies to manage and reduce the carbon footprint of the goods and services they offer.

So a better approach (which we also discussed) this morning, maybe to not distinguish the world into big companies which are heavy emitters and the rest of the world. Instead it maybe more useful to look for the low hanging fruits, i.e. to look for greatest inefficiencies, across all industries and companies.