Photo: m kasahara via Flickr.Sitting in a movie theater staring at a series of images flashing on the big screen in front of you may not seem like the most ecofriendly of activities this Earth Day weekend. But what if that film moves you in such a way that you change your daily habits?

Two film festivals screening in Seattle this weekend are hoping to do just that. The annual Seattle Jewish Film Festival has chosen environmental awareness as its theme this year in an effort to "artfully teach how 'going green' is a core Jewish value." In addition to the selection of films, there will be an eco-art exhibit, a showroom of electric vehicles, and a panel discussion about "green faith." Audience members will be asked to take the "Jewish Climate Challenge," a promise to make lifestyle changes that will have a positive -- and measurable -- effect on the earth.

The niftily acronymed (though perhaps less devote) National Film Festival for Talented Youth is also hoping to leave a lighter footprint this year. The 100 percent carbon neutral film festival is featuring a number of environment-themed films among its selection of works by filmmakers age 22 and under.

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The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) wants make the 2010 Winter Games carbon neutral, but the plan it released Monday counts on help from the private sector to make it happen.

At the World Conference on Sport and the Environment, VANOC announced a plan to neutralize 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in British Columbia. That's the amount of emissions the February 2010 games will create, according to a preliminary carbon forecast by the David Suzuki Foundation. The forecast expects two thirds of that amount will come from air travel by spectators and participants.

Vancouver isn't the first city to attempt a carbon neutral Olympics -- Salt Lake City and Torino made similar promises. But organizers here say theirs is the broadest attempt yet. The 300,000-tons estimate includes carbon dioxide generated by pre-games construction and the 2010 Paralympic Games, to be held in Vancouver later next spring.

VANOC doesn't plan to pay for the offsets itself, CEO John Furlong said. Instead, it's counting on a corporate sponsor to step up just 10 months before the games, long after most sponsorships have been lined up. At current carbon prices of about $15 a ton, meeting the 2010 target would cost about $3.6 million ($4.5 million Canadian), said Linda Coady, vice-president of sustainability for the organizing committee.

Responsibility for executing the offset plan will be placed in the hands of the Pacific Carbon Trust, a newly created corporation that helps oversee the Province of British Columbia's carbon emissions reduction plan. Organizers said they didn't know exactly what projects those offsets would support just yet. Coady said they would likely include retrofitting buildings to run on geothermal or biomass heating instead of natural gas, for one.

Carbon offsets are frequently knocked for not actually reducing emissions (even Grist's Umbra Fisk has weighed in), and Vancouver games organizers conceded there's a big difference between high- and low-quality offsets. They promised to deliver the good kind. "We think the Pacific Carbon Trust standard is going to be one of the highest standards in the world," Coady told a group of reporters.

But the plan would not necessarily meet the internationally recognized gold standard for voluntary offsets, she said, because VANOC wanted to ensure it was weighted toward B.C. projects.

Organizers were asked if offsets are really about easing in the consciences of polluters, and Furlong responded that the offset program really "causes people to change behavior." For example, VANOC officials are traveling less to international meetings and teleconferencing instead, he said.

He promised the 2010 Games would be a shining example of environmental responsibility. "We only get one chance, one opportunity," he said. "Since we're in a part of the world that cares a lot about this, we're doing what we can."

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Dell Computer's worldwide business operations are now carbon neutral, the company announced Wednesday. True carbon neutrality is, of course, a chimera for a giant IT company; notes business analyst Clive Longbottom, "You have to question whether they have taken all their workers' commuting into consideration and the materials in making a computer, going all the way back to zinc mining." Perhaps not, but Dell now sources one-fifth of its power from renewable sources, buys renewable-energy credits for the rest, and is paying for forest preservation in Madagascar in order to offset 475,000 tons of emissions. Dell, which aims to be "the greenest technology company on the planet," has also installed energy-efficient lighting, heating, and computing systems in its offices -- which provide the handy side benefit of $3 million in savings each year.

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The Sierra Club is embarking on its first product endorsement, putting its logo on Clorox's new Green Works cleaning products. Various businesses are aiming to bypass carbon neutrality and move straight on into carbon negativity. These and more stories show up in a New York Times "Business of Green" section Wednesday, which covers the green-biz gamut, from companies trying to manufacture safer chemicals, to financial techniques helping to grow the solar sector, to shareholders unconvinced that going green means making green. The rising of green-collar jobs and the growth of academic programs focused at moving students into them are also considered. Shall we start calling the paper the Green Lady instead?

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The phrase "to Google" has become synonymous with "to search." But soon it may connote something altogether different: "to green." That is, if the internet titan can successfully pull off its latest world-changing endeavor.

Bill Weihl.

In late 2007, the dot-com giant announced its intention to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The RE<C program aims to produce one gigawatt of electricity generating capacity -- enough to power the city of San Francisco -- from clean, green sources "within years, not decades." The man responsible for making it happen, and for making the company carbon neutral, is Bill Weihl, Google's flamboyantly titled "green energy czar." He'll have hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal to get the job done.

This is not Google's first foray into clean-tech: Since 2006, the company has been investing mightily in R&D for plug-in hybrids and renewable-energy innovation via its for-profit philanthropy arm, Google.org.

But the scope and ambition of RE<C dwarfs previous efforts -- and raises some questions. For one, why is Google refusing to disclose how much energy it consumes? For another, why does the green energy czar have a background in computers instead of power plants? And, most importantly, why should we believe an internet company can solve the world's energy crisis?

Weihl spoke to me from his office in Seattle.

Let's start with your title. Who came up with it, and what does it mean?

It was my boss's suggestion. My title before that was something like "energy strategist," and he said, "You need a better title, something fun. How about green energy czar?" I thought, "That sounds pretty good."

What exactly are your responsibilities?

Narrowly speaking, my job is to make Google's energy supplies much cleaner, particularly focused on our data centers, which make up the bulk of our energy consumption.

But my boss and the founders have made clear that the goal isn't just to make Google green. We could green our operations completely tomorrow, but if we just did that, the world wouldn't care, the climate certainly wouldn't care -- we're not that big.

The real goal is to do this in a way that has a much broader impact. So it really gets into how we might invest in both renewable energy companies and internal R&D to help advance the state of technology and renewable markets -- to make renewable energy truly mainstream, not just a tiny fraction of the energy supply.

Your mandate, specifically, is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity more cheaply than coal-generated energy within years, not decades. That's an immense challenge. What's your plan of action?

We're going to invest tens of millions of dollars each year over the next few years in our own people, lab space, building prototypes, and investing in start-up companies. All of this will be aimed at developing technologies that are proved at least at a pilot scale, and then ready to be manufactured and deployed at gigawatt-and-beyond scales in, say, five years.

There are lots of companies and research groups doing work on technologies that have a reasonable chance of getting to the price point we're talking about in 15 or 20 years, but we feel that there's both an urgent problem as well as an opportunity that demands getting there much faster, if at all possible. From a climate point of view, we can't afford to wait 15 or 20 years to really start to curb global emissions in a big way.

What renewable technologies are you focusing on -- far-out concepts, or proven technologies like solar panels and wind turbines?

We are not at the moment focused on solar panels and traditional wind turbines. We are looking quite generally at solar, wind, and geothermal because those are pretty large resources that could potentially, any one of them, supply a very large fraction of the world's energy needs.

But there are technology problems that need to be solved, including cost and the fact that solar and wind are intermittent resources, they're not there all the time, which means if you want to have them be a large fraction of your electricity supply, you need to figure out how to store that kind of energy on a very large scale. There's also the issue of transmission, because the best solar and wind resources are in regions of the country where there aren't a lot of people and a lot of demand. So we need better high-voltage lines to allow you to move more power long distances.

What's an example of something you are working on?

In the realm of solar, we're concentrating on solar thermal technologies that capture the sun's energy as heat and use that to make steam, which then drives a steam turbine -- just as a coal plant might burn coal and use steam. (Photovoltaic panels, by contrast, convert the sun's light directly into electricity.) It's actually relatively cheap and easy to store the heat for a few hours, which makes this thermal plant one of most promising options for making solar a constant, base-load power source.

Many argue that coal's price advantage over renewables is an illusion, that the real costs of coal are not represented in its market price. So effectively you're fighting on a tilted playing field. Would Google lobby for regulatory measures that would level the playing field, like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system?

We might. We've been talking about that. I think generally we are supportive of internalizing those externalities.

At the same time, if you realistically look at the price differential between renewables and nonrenewables today, even with, say, a $30-per-ton price on carbon -- which is pretty high compared to what's been seen in the European trading system so far, or what's been proposed as a likely target of a carbon cap or tax in this country -- that might still not quite narrow the gap between renewables and coal. So we need the technology side, too.

At Google, our focus for the moment is on driving the cost of renewables down as much as possible. And if society manages to raise the cost of coal, then that will help renewables compete.

But remember, this is a global problem, it's not just a U.S. problem. China and India are rapidly increasing their use of coal. It strikes me as unlikely that they will put a substantial price on carbon anytime soon. So even if we make renewables competitive with coal in the U.S. with a carbon price, that still won't be cheap enough to really matter in China and India -- in which case the climate is still in deep trouble.

What would you say your chances of success are for RE<C?

Well, it's funny. Some people just say, "You guys are absolutely nuts." They assume we have no idea what the challenges are. I think we do have a pretty good idea of what the challenges are. The challenge I would throw out to everyone else is that we all need to address these challenges. We at Google are willing to take them on.

I think there's a chance -- maybe it's 10 percent, maybe it's 20 percent, some people probably think it's 1 percent -- that we'll be completely successful at hitting our goal.

The question is, if we don't hit that goal of making renewables cheaper than coal in four or five or six years, where do we end up? One possibility is we completely fail, and at the end of that time we have nothing. I think that is an extremely unlikely outcome. A more likely scenario is that we don't quite get to a price point that's cheaper than coal, or we don't get there as quickly as we want, so it takes us 10 years. In either of those scenarios, we will have technologies that we can license or that can lead to very large spin-off businesses, which will be good for us and our shareholders, and also will help increase the amount of renewables used in the world substantially.

My general feeling is that if you aim low, you're unlikely to get very high.

Let's say your RE<C goal is successful. How quickly do you think renewable sources would scale up once they're cost competitive? How soon would they fully supplant conventional energy sources, if ever?

That's very hard to predict. If you look at the transition in our overall energy infrastructure over the last 150 years, it tends to go in 30-year cycles. So I think that one simple answer would be it'll probably take 30 years to supplant the traditional system with the new system, at least in great part.

Another answer is that it should be possible to accelerate that if our society takes it on as a goal and we are willing to invest the money and intellectual capital to reach it.

Do you support, as Al Gore and James Hansen have recommended, a freeze on the development of new coal plants in the U.S.?

We don't have a policy on that at the moment. I think the U.S. needs to stop increasing emissions and start decreasing as soon as possible, so not constructing new coal plants is probably a useful step in that direction.

What's your take on the premise of "clean coal"? Would you support IGCC [PDF] and carbon sequestration if they're commercially proven?

Yeah. If they're really commercially proven, that's way better than dirty coal. It would be a huge advance. But I don't think that that alone is going to be enough. We need cleaner technologies that don't have all the other impacts of coal from mining and so on.

Have you been getting any pushback from King Coal?

No.

You are also charged with the task of making Google carbon neutral. What strategies are you implementing to this end?

There are three pieces. The first is energy efficiency, and that really should be the first on anybody's list. For a number of years, we've been designing our own servers and data centers. Our computing facilities use less than half the energy of a typical industry facility for the same amount of useful computing. That is a huge competitive advantage for us.

Second thing is to deploy renewables as widely as you can, and the major step we've taken to date on that is the 1.6-megawatt photovoltaic array here on our Mountain View campus. We committed in June to deploy a minimum of 50 megawatts of renewables by 2012; I would expect that we'll do more than that.

Third, once we've done everything we can around energy efficiency and renewables to reduce our emissions, we're investing in offset projects that, for example, eliminate methane emissions from landfills, coal mines, or agricultural waste.

Do you see offsets as a last resort?

That's right. I would describe offsets as something that if that's all you do, then it is tantamount to greenwashing.

Why is Google declining to disclose its total energy and carbon footprint? How can the public hold you accountable to your pledge if they don't know what kind of energy you're using?

The size of our operation -- in terms of number of servers, the amount of computing power -- is a closely guarded secret, because it is information that would be extremely valuable to our competitors. If we disclosed our electricity consumption or carbon footprint, that would allow people to essentially back-calculate approximately how many servers we have, etc.

How can people can trust that we actually are hitting our target? We have contracted with Environmental Resources Trust, an independent nonprofit that does exactly these kinds of audits and verifications, to validate our carbon inventory, our measurement and accounting of our footprint, and to validate that we have purchased quality offsets.

More and more technology companies and leaders are getting involved in the energy sector. We see Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla promoting ethanol and IBM investing hugely in green technology, for instance. How would you explain this crossover between the digital revolution and the clean-energy revolution?

I think it's motivated by two issues. One is that people see a huge problem that needs a solution: growing emissions are contributing to climate change, which could have a devastating impact on many parts of the world. Two, that problem presents an enormous opportunity to innovate and develop solutions that then can make a lot of money. The amount of money in the energy sector is enormous, so even if you can only solve a small part of the problem, you can still make a lot of money.

Also, electricity is the blood of your data centers. If we don't have a sustainable energy solution, we don't have an internet.

That's right. Google has a vested interest in maintaining a stable, reliable, reasonably affordable supply of energy. And as economies and energy use keep growing around the world, the price of fossil-fuel-based energy is not going anywhere but up. That's a trend that doesn't bode well for our cost structure over the 10- to 20-year time frame.

Why are you the right guy for Google's green energy czar job?

I guess to actually answer that I can't be too modest: I think I'm really smart. I have a deep understanding of science and engineering. The bulk of my professional training was in computers, hardware and software, but I've been interested in renewable energy and sustainability forever, and for the last number of years increasingly interested in the issue of climate change and what we can do about it.

This problem requires somebody who can really understand and deal with both the big picture as well as the technical issues around developing the solutions that we need. That's the kind of thing I'm very good at.

So you're a computer guy, not an energy guy, by training. Do you think coming at this problem from the outside gives you an advantage because you look at it in a different way?

Yes. Coming from the outside, you don't know what's impossible yet. That was one of the great things I learned when I taught at MIT: students came in and they didn't know much, but they managed to do things that you might have thought couldn't be done.

What are you doing personally to reduce your carbon footprint?

I've got my mother's voice in the back of my head telling me and my kids, "Turn off the lights." My mother was an environmentalist in some ways before there were environmentalists: we were recycling and composting before anybody knew what those words were.

We have a Prius and a [Toyota] Sienna minivan, which isn't as efficient, but it's not bad. We put solar panels on the roof of our house about a year and a half ago. We've got a tankless on-demand water heater. We've done a lot of insulation and weather-stripping. We put in energy-efficient light bulbs. We turn our computers off or put them to sleep when we're not using them.

For us and for most people, if something becomes inconvenient or in some way involves sacrifice, in the end people don't do it very much. So we need to find a way to make it happen automatically and to make it be something that doesn't involve major compromises. There are enormous opportunities to do that in a lot of sectors.

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This weekend, while you're finishing up the last of the chocolates in your advent calendar -- oh admit it, you ate them all already -- Britons Andy Pag and John Grimshaw will be rolling to the end of a chocolate-fueled road trip. The duo claim that their trip from Poole, England through the Sahara desert to Timbuktu, Mali, will be the world's first carbon-negative voyage, thanks to their fuel: 396 gallons of chocolate discarded by a British manufacturer. "This way we're doing the chocolate factory a favor by taking away their waste, we're doing the local government a favor by occupying less space in their landfills, but most importantly, we're doing the environment a favor by reducing our carbon footprint," says Chris Elvey of biodiesel maker Ecotec, which developed the chocolate-to-fuel technology. Pag and Grimshaw plan to leave their vehicles and equipment in Timbuktu to be reused -- at which point we assume the carbon-negativity will end, unless they plan to walk home.

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Dole will make some tropical-fruit distribution carbon-neutral

U.S. residents have a heckuva hard time finding a local pineapple (Hawaiians respectfully excluded, of course). But now you can nosh your tropical fruit with less guilt; Dole Food Co. has pledged to work toward offsetting 100 percent of the CO2 emissions that its subsidiary produces from growing bananas and pineapples in Costa Rica. Working with government agencies, the company plans to carbon-neutralize its entire supply chain, from growing the fruit to packing, transporting, and distributing it in North America and Europe. And those emissions are far from insignificant: Dole ships some 31 million boxes of bananas and 13 million boxes of pineapples annually from Costa Rica, which aims to be a carbon-neutral country by 2021.

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Rupert Murdoch.

When Rupert Murdoch, the cantankerous and conservative owner of Fox News, enthusiastically joins the fight against climate change, you know we're past the tipping point on the issue. Think landslide.

Last week, the media mogul pledged not only to make his News Corp. empire carbon neutral, but to persuade the hundreds of millions of people who watch his TV channels and read his newspapers to join the cause. Messages about climate change will be woven throughout News Corp.'s entertainment content, he said, from movies to books to TV sitcoms, and the issue will have an increasing presence in the company's news coverage, be it in the New York Post or on Hannity & Colmes. Yes, as Murdoch told Grist in an exclusive interview on his climate plan, even Fox News' right-wing firebrand Sean Hannity can be expected to come around on the issue.

Murdoch's climate conversion marks a major turning point for a man who has made campaign contributions to numerous conservative Republicans, including recently ousted Sens. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), both of whom have expressed skepticism about the reality of climate change. Now, as Murdoch told Grist, a willingness to address the climate challenge will be a "litmus test" in his political giving.

Still, Murdoch is hardly a sentimental do-gooder. "[A]cting on this issue is simply good business," he said during the launch of his climate plan last week.

Whatever the motivation, News Corp.'s global reach is immense, and its grand climate plan could, if faithfully implemented, have a seismic impact that makes that of An Inconvenient Truth look like a tremor.

I sat down with Murdoch in his midtown Manhattan office after the launch to discuss how he came to embrace the climate cause, what he thinks of President Bush's environmental record, and whether an action hero can drive a hybrid car. (Full disclosure: I have a book contract with HarperCollins, a News Corp. company.)

What motivated you to implement your climate plan? Was there a "conversion moment" when you realized this needed to be a priority?

I grew up in Australia, which is facing its worst drought in 100 years -- that has struck a personal chord for me. I've read about the climate issue over the years, but I was probably a bit more skeptical than my son, James, who's a complete convert, and who converted me. I saw what he did at [British Sky Broadcasting] and we said, well, let's make it company-wide.

So this is an example of younger-generation sensibilities trickling up?

Well, more twisting my arm, at first. But I've become more enthusiastic day by day. I don't think there's any question of my conviction on this issue -- I've come to feel it very strongly. The more I've looked into it, the more I've been able to see what we can do, not just from an operations standpoint but by subtly introducing [the climate issue] into our content.

What do you intend to achieve with your climate plan, and how will you meet your goals?

We want to help solve the climate problem. We'll squeeze our own energy use down as much as we can. We'll become carbon neutral for our own emissions within three years, and be entirely transparent throughout the process, publicly reporting our reductions and offsets. But that's just a start. Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours, so clearly that's where we can have the most influence.

You're known for making business-savvy decisions. What's your bottom-line argument for your climate program?

Whatever it costs will be minimal compared to our overall revenues, and we'll get that back many times over, by running a more efficient company and by growing morale among our employees. This program is a huge morale builder.

What's the business logic of weaving the climate issue into your content?

From what we see within our own company and from reading polls, the younger generation gets the issue of climate change completely. I think it will grow our appeal to younger audiences and bond our programming to them.

What opportunities does it present from an advertising perspective?

There will be a lot of national and international marketers who will want to take advantage of the public mood around climate change. Car manufacturers are going to want to compete on fuel economy, for instance. It may not be the main thrust of their marketing, but we are certainly hearing from advertisers that they want to reach audiences on this issue.

Can you give some examples of how you'll infuse this issue into your programming?

Oh, the opportunities are endless. We own SPEED [a cable channel focused on cars and motor sports], for example -- that's got 60 or 70 million homes it goes into. We can get a lot of green programming in there. We're going to encourage this effort among the writers on all of our entertainment programming, whether it's sitcoms or movies or reality shows. Then there's the online arena, where we have MySpace, where we've already launched a channel dedicated to climate change. MySpace has got 175 million profiles on it, and that represents huge reach among the grassroots.

Do you worry that it will seem awkward to wedge the climate issue into your programming?

No, we've got to make sure it doesn't happen that way. There's got to be a certain degree of gradualism -- it has to feel natural, it has to make sense. Can a hero drive a hybrid car? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But what about a biodiesel SUV?

In your speech, you said, "We want to inspire people to change their behavior." Would you characterize this climate campaign as "activist media"?

There certainly is an activism element to it.

Might that complicate expectations of journalistic objectivity?

We're known for saying what we think in our newspapers. But this will in no way compromise journalistic independence. We're not a monolithic organization. We have on all our media outlets lots of columns representing many different sides.

But do you see Fox News and your newspaper outlets covering the climate issue differently as a result of this program?

Well, certainly giving it more attention. There will be more articles, more references, but the same broad range of opinions.

You said in your speech, "The debate is shifting from whether climate change is really happening to how to solve it." Doesn't that mean that the nature of the coverage would be changing, too?

Yes. I think when people see that 99 percent of scientists agree about the serious extent of global warming, it's going to become a fact of life.

Some of the commentators on Fox News have expressed skeptical views about climate science -- take Sean Hannity, for instance, or Bill O'Reilly. Have you heard any reaction from them to this program, or any backlash within News Corp.?

I haven't discussed it with them yet. And, no, I haven't heard any talk about it. Probably Sean's first reaction will be that this is some liberal cause or something, you know? But he's a very reasonable, very intelligent man. He'll see, he'll understand it. As will Bill -- he just likes to get debate going between people. And that has its benefits -- someone says "No there isn't," someone says "Yes there is," and they have it out for 10 minutes and it's entertaining and creates more consciousness.

You've been a longtime supporter of President Bush. What do you think of his climate strategy?

I've been a supporter and a critic of President Bush. I certainly supported his election. If you want my opinion, I think he's a greenie at heart, but they keep having committees and talking about what they should do, in some cases instead of doing it. I think he's a bad communicator; he should be getting out in front on this issue publicly.

But I think they're doing a lot behind the scenes, with ethanol and corn, for instance. This administration has put a huge amount of funding going toward climate research, and doesn't get any credit for it. It's typical of Bush -- I mean, he's tripled or quadrupled the money going to Africa for AIDS, and you never hear him talk about it.

Will you support, going forward, politicians who are trying to block action on climate change?

No. I think that that would be a litmus test, almost. If you had someone who is totally opposed to doing anything about climate change, I would oppose them.

Would you want them to support a mandatory cap on carbon emissions?

I would agree with that, to an extent. We have to be careful not to make this country totally noncompetitive, because it would just throw tens of millions of people out of work. Or worse, cause us to have to write a lot of tariffs, which would throw tens of millions of people out of work in other countries.

Do you have a favorite in the 2008 race?

I don't know who's sailing.

No, I mean the presidential race.

Ah! I thought you were talking about the America's Cup! [Laughs.] No, frankly I have fairly skeptical feelings about all of the candidates at the moment.

What are you doing on a personal level to reduce your carbon footprint?

Well, I got a hybrid car, which is a Lexus. It's a great car, but, I confess, I haven't learned how to read the dashboard yet!

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Today, the fast-growing cadre of corporate leaders pressing for climate action welcomes a new member: Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, the media empire that encompasses Fox News, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, MySpace.com, and dozens of newspapers in Australia, the U.K., the U.S., and beyond.

Rupert Murdoch.

Photo: Kelly Kline/WireImage.com

At an event held this morning in midtown Manhattan and webcast to all News Corp. employees, Murdoch launched a company-wide plan to address climate change that includes not only a pledge to reduce the company's emissions (which has come to be expected at such biz-greening events) but also a vow to weave climate messaging into the content and programming of News Corp.'s many holdings.

"The challenge is to revolutionize the [climate change] message," Murdoch told the crowd. He emphasized the need to "make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior."

Grist obtained an exclusive advance copy of Murdoch's speech and the company's energy plan.

While not groundbreaking, Murdoch's strategy to cut News Corp.'s own emissions is nothing to sneeze at: The company will reduce its carbon footprint 10 percent by 2012 via energy-efficiency efforts and use of renewable energy, and it will become carbon-neutral even sooner, in 2010, by buying emission offsets from projects such as wind farms in India.

But Murdoch said that News Corp.'s hundreds of millions of viewers and readers represent the most fertile ground for change: "Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours ... Imagine if we succeed in inspiring our audiences to reduce their own impacts on climate change by just 1 percent. That would be like turning the state of California off for almost two months."

These might be surprising observations coming from any media titan, but all the more so from a man who has long worn his conservative politics on his sleeve and whose company owns outlets like Fox News and The New York Post, which are widely considered right-leaning. Murdoch is an outspoken supporter of President Bush, and just last month criticized the press for being too hard on Dubyah. "[T]here's a sort of monolithic attack on him every day of the year," Murdoch told a meeting of business leaders.

While Fox News ran a surprisingly fair and balanced news special on climate change a year and a half ago, and has journalists like Shepard Smith who seem to take the problem seriously, the channel is better typified by conservative commentator Sean Hannity, who recently bashed Al Gore and others who are concerned about climate change as "liberal global-warming hysterical people."

So what's motivating Murdoch?

While he voiced concerns that "climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats," his emphasis was on opportunities to fatten the bottom line. "Our advertisers are asking us for ways to reach audiences on this issue," Murdoch said. He also argued that the new climate strategy would reduce energy costs, help the company recruit top talent, and provide "a chance to deepen our relationships with our viewers, readers, and web users."

And yet the strategy for boosting climate-related content throughout News Corp. divisions is still vague. Murdoch mentioned new green programming on the car and motorcycle cable network SPEED, a "Preserve Our Planet" program on the National Geographic Channel, and a channel dedicated to climate change on MySpace, but the larger vision is not yet defined by a quantifiable target.

News Corp. Vice President of Business Development Roy Bahat told Grist that the company will not try to awkwardly wedge the issue into programs, but said, "It will naturally become more prevalent throughout our programming, be it sitcoms or news. We are asking all of our creative leaders to incorporate climate change in ways that would make drama more dramatic, or comedy funnier, or news more relevant -- ways that inspire viewers to bond with the program."

Coverage of global warming in News Corp. outlets has already gone up considerably in the last year, Bahat said: "For example, The Times of London had roughly 50 percent more climate-related stories last year than the previous year. It wasn't because of a mandate, it's because the audience wants to hear about it. The audience drives us as much as we drive the audience."

But Murdoch himself seems very comfortable with the notion of driving his audiences, describing his goals in terms that smack more of a Greenpeace activist than a corporate boss: "The climate problem will not be solved without mass participation by the general public in countries around the globe. And that's where we come in."

How long, then, before American Idol participants are tasked with creating a snappier climate anthem than Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up"?

Full disclosure: Amanda Griscom Little has a book contract with HarperCollins, a News Corp. company.

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