It's a widely repeated statistic that the IT industry is responsible for about 2 percent of the world's carbon footprint, largely due to the energy used to power electronics.

What is less widely discussed -- although it is increasingly part of the dialogue, and something we cover regularly on GreenerComputing.com -- is how IT can affect that other 98 percent of the world's emissions. It's a concept called "green IT 2.0," and at the State of Green Business Forum yesterday, leaders from some of the world's largest IT companies gathered to talk about exactly that.

Gathered on the stage at the PG&E Auditorium in San Francisco were Rob Bernard, Microsoft's Chief Environmental Strategist; Scott Bolick, the vice president of SAP Sustainability at SAP Labs; Rich Lechner, IBM's vice president of Energy & Environment; and Lorie Wigle, the general manager of Intel's Eco-Technology Program Office (as well as the president of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative).

Wigle started off the conversation by asking if looking at the whole idea of addressing "the other 98 percent" led to limited thinking. "It gets us too focused on energy and efficiency," Wigle said, adding that "it gets in the way of looking at technological solutions" for other environmental issues, like adaptation to climate change.

Lechner followed on that point by laying out some of the non-energy efficiency projects that IBM is working on as part of its Smarter Planet initiative. In addition to developing smart grid projects around the world, IBM has developed a traffic monitoring system in Singapore that not only tracks where traffic is backing up, but can now predict traffic jams as well, redirecting drivers to alternative routes or to mass transit options.

When SAP began looking into how to apply its extensive reach into some of the world's largest companies across all industries, its customers and partners urged the firm to focus on developing a holistic look at the business processes of its 89,000 customers, Bolick told the crowd.

A key goal of SAP's sustainable process management platform, launched last year, is to help executives identify the areas where efficiency or environmental projects can lead to big savings. Bolick gave the example of oil company Valero, which put in an energy-monitoring dashboard at seven of its 16 plants to figure out where efficiency could be improved. In those plants, the company is now saving $150 million a year in costs.

Microsoft's Rob Bernard took more of a long view on the sustainability challenge, comparing the complexity that the utility industry is facing with the smart grid to how software companies evolved.

Utilities, Bernard said, currently manage about 40 energy-generating sources on average. But that number has already begun ballooning as homes, cars, offices and gadgets of all types begin to send power back to the grid as well as draw from it.

Developing the tools to get individuals to connect with the smart grid will need collaboration, and it will take a lot of work to get it as simple as it needs to be to work well, Bernard said.

"[The IT industry has] already gone through this," Bernard said. "We're still building complexity on top of complexity to make software easier for the user. The utilities are going through this again right now, and shame on us if we're not able to help them with that."