If your husband is a tennis fanatic like mine then your television is going to be commandeered for much of early September as the world’s tennis superstars slam their way through the U.S. Open. And this year, in addition to some really great tennis, we saw a barrage of advertising from IBM promoting its green server business. (We also saw a healthy dose of the US Open itself going green -- thanks to some excellent work by my NRDC colleagues and Billie Jean King, but I'll leave that for another post.)

Now it is true -- as noted on the Green Data Center blog -- that the IBM ads are marketing material through and through, but I have to say that it is some of the best marketing material I've ever seen. The ads (see below for an example) make a strong financial argument that we all need to hear.

The concept is simple: a young woman brings an energy efficiency plan involving the firm's data centers to her boss who all but ridicules her as a tree-hugging, granola-eating idiot. When the boss asks why in the world he should sign off on her plan, she calmly responds: "This plan could cut our energy costs by 40 percent and we spent $18 million on energy last year."

Mr. Bluster can't sign the papers fast enough.

Luckily business leadership is listening and turning marketing material like the IBM ads into reality. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that big computer makers are spotting a trend.

"Rising electricity prices, coupled with new computer servers that run hotter and require more power, has corporate technology buyers looking for ways to cut back," the article by William Bulkeley says. "Power use in data centers -- the large, climate-controlled rooms that house a company's computer servers, storage devices and communications switches -- doubled from 2000 to 2006 and now accounts for about 1.5% of U.S. electricity consumption, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A recent McKinsey & Co. report says that world-wide, the centers' carbon emissions exceed those of Argentina."

And growing quickly. Forbes.com today has a story about Cisco and its plans for worldwide data center domination. "The giants of the Internet--Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon--plus fast-moving Chinese upstarts like Baidu and TenCent, are building more of these giant centers. Microsoft figures it will expand its network of data centers 64-fold over the next few years, just to handle some 200 services, including Xbox online gaming, video and corporate software rented over the Web."

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: Congress will adopt global warming legislation once enough states and big business interests see the "green" light. Until then, sound energy policy will too often be ridiculed as nothing more than good PR.