If diplomats headed to Copenhagen this December are able to negotiate a new global climate treaty, how will the world know these countries are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as much as they claim? Michael Woelk, the chief executive of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Picarro, believes he has an answer: build a network of monitoring sites equipped with his company’s sensors that can detect carbon dioxide and other GHGs down to single-digit parts per billion. Woelk’s grand vision got one, albeit small, step closer to reality today with the announcement that the World Meteorological Organization will be using Picarro’s sensors to verify measurements taken from hundreds of GHG-monitoring stations around the world. Picarro will lend one of its $50,000 gas analyzers to a Swiss-based research lab that conducts audits for the WMO. Woelk, in a statement, described the selection of Picarro’s technology as a “technical validation.”

Woelk told us that the deal will bring “terrific exposure” to his company’s analyzers, but the chief executive has bigger aspirations than the WMO’s program. He says the current methods used by governments (and companies) to calculate GHG emissions are often based on the amount of fuel consumed and can thus be inaccurate. Governments and companies could also be tempted to provide fraudulent data about their reductions, especially as carbon credit trading becomes a bigger and more lucrative business. Woelk think his sensors can help bring more transparency to carbon emissions calculations.

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The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, continuing its march against government-imposed limits on carbon emissions (see here and here for examples), has added another misleading commentary to the ongoing discussion about a cap-and-trade system. This time it alleges that there is “evidence” that the Obama administration “understands” how damaging carbon regulations will be, but is pressing ahead with them anyway.

What is this smoking gun unearthed by the Journal? It’s that the White House is currently reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency’s April finding that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant, and thus subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The Journal says that because the Obama administration is taking steps to exempt small emitters such as hospitals and bakeries from the regulation (by raising the pollution level at which the EPA is required to step in), we now have evidence that the White House is aware that limits on greenhouse gas emissions will hurt the economy. The Journal asks, “If the green future is going to be so bright, why does the White House want to exempt so many businesses from its glories?” Well, because it understands smart policy.

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Carbon offsets — credits that cancel out the purchaser’s greenhouse gas emissions by supposedly triggering actions and projects that prevent such pollution elsewhere — have had a bumpy ride in the last few years. By late 2007, the idea of going “carbon neutral” using offsets had gained enough clout in the U.S. that the House of Representatives spent about $89,000 on offsets. A host of tech companies jumped aboard, too, with Dell, Google and Yahoo, among others, all pledging to go carbon neutral. But since then, the largely unregulated carbon offset market has been dragged through the mud as upon closer inspection, it became clear that emissions weren’t always being canceled out. [Digg]

Now, with new climate policies and regulations coming down the pike — the EPA plans to spend $5 million next year developing a methodology for carbon offsets under the cap-and-trade system being negotiated in Congress — the ground on which carbon offsets stand is shifting significantly. Tech rivals Google and Yahoo have mapped out two different visions for how to navigate it.

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For cleantech companies, climate change has been a big deal for some time. But it’s officially become a major mainstream business issue, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers report, “Capitalizing On a Climate of Change,” that says energy and climate policies are influencing the way all companies report their finances, raise capital, and value merger and acquisition deals.

In other words, climate change is evolving from a scientific and public policy issue to a business concern. “Until recently, the impact of climate change on the deal market was barely on the radar of most businesses,” PricewaterhouseCoopers said in the report released Tuesday. “However, national policy action on greenhouse gas emissions is requiring companies in virtually every industry to think about the impacts on energy and climate policies on their business.”

That’s good news for those developing and selling products to help businesses go green and comply with ever-changing energy and climate regulations. And PricewaterhouseCoopers expects climate change to become increasingly important to investors and to companies’ valuations.

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Carbon management software is like a sophomore on the cleantech campus: it’s been around for awhile, but it’s just now starting to get noticed by the senior class. This month SAP took over Clear Standards, a carbon management startup that raised $4 million last fall, and IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have each recently dipped a toe into the carbon management waters. This morning another young company, Planet Metrics, a San Bruno, Calif.-based carbon management software firm, is looking to attract attention with the launch of its software-as-a-service application into beta with high-profile new customer Method, the San Francisco-based green cleaning products company.

As we explained back in November, when Planet Metrics raised $2.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the software helps companies assess energy and carbon use in their business and identify “hot spots” (see screenshot above) — or areas where the biggest emissions reductions can be made. The system connects to other business enterprise software, and taps into several deep databases of information about life-cycle environmental impacts of ingredients, transportation methods and more.

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U.S. carbon regulation is looming, but many large publicly traded companies will be caught with their pants down. According to a report from the not-for-profit Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute (IRRCi) and research company Trucost, a good 66 percent of companies on the S&P 500 do not publish adequate data on direct greenhouse gas emissions from operations and “could therefore be unprepared for mandatory reporting requirements.”

That’s bad news for the lagging companies, as they’ll be in a tough spot once the regulations hit and international markets get big enough to put them at a competitive disadvantage. Oil and power companies made up the bulk of the biggest carbon emitters. (The top five were Exxon, Chevron, AEP, The Southern Co. and ConocoPhillips.)

But it’s good news for the carbon and energy management software companies that have emerged as of late. Just yesterday, 18-month-old sustainable software-as-a-service startup Hara launched a tool to give companies and cities the ability to manage their natural resource inputs and outputs, with backing from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

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There have been as many new carbon management startups launched over the past year as super model-based reality TV shows — the promise of the carbon markets boosted by U.S. regulation are just too attractive to entrepreneurs. But one 18-month-old sustainable software startup, Hara, is coming out of so-called stealth on Monday, with backing from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and a claim that it’s doing something completely different.

Hara CEO Amit Chatterjee tells us that Hara’s software-as-a-service product gives companies and municipalities the ability to itemize and track all of the inputs (water, electricity, chemicals) and outputs (the product, greenhouse gases, wastewater) that make up the business processes. By identifying both the inputs and outputs, Chatterjee says, Hara can then suggest how to optimize the overall system, enabling the customer to save substantial money and reduce waste. Many other carbon and energy management software tools focus exclusively on just carbon and electricity, and leave out the last step of prescribing ways that the company can tweak its business to become more efficient.

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Energy use in buildings could be cut by as much as 60 percent by mid-century, but doing so would take more than just adopting energy-saving technologies. That’s according to the findings of a four-year study looking at residential and commercial building sectors around the world and published Monday by the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a global business association. The report, entitled “Transforming the Market: Energy Efficiency in Buildings,” is being touted as the most rigorous study ever conducted on the subject and includes a sweeping road map for the building industry to achieve this energy-cutting goal. “Energy efficiency is fast becoming one of the defining issues of our times, and buildings are that issue’s elephant in the room,” said Björn Stigson, president of the business council, in a statement.

Besides the adoption of technology, like high-insulating window and walls or energy-efficient lighting, the report makes five principle recommendations. They include: strengthening building codes and energy labeling for more transparency; using subsidies and price signals to incentivize energy-efficient investments; encouraging a more integrated design approach among building professionals; enabling the workforce to save energy; and fostering an energy-aware culture.

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As social media has exploded, web startups building social applications are offering users ways to manage that proliferation. Some, such as FriendFeed, provide a central place for users to aggregate different services, while others, like Facebook Connect, offer tools for federation — a single way to access them all. But the dilemma over whether it’s better to aggregate or federate isn’t confined to social media — companies building out the smart grid and related infrastructure technologies are beginning to grapple with this question, too.

When it comes to carbon and energy data, the purchases we make and the resources we use constitute our de facto “profiles” in real-world networks such as utility grids, roadways, financial systems and business supply chains. Energy and carbon management tools integrate information about our total energy use from these profiles in an effort to cut our carbon footprints. As smart technologies provide ever more data for these profiles, a Facebook Connect-like approach that uses federation, rather than aggregation, may be best-positioned to make energy and carbon management tools more effective, without sacrificing user privacy.

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If a company wants to improve energy efficiency, it needs to think about how it can affect its products and its suppliers rather than merely what it can do internally, says Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist at Microsoft speaking today at the Green:Net Conference in San Francisco. “We have a massive problem and a massive challenge and a massive opportunity,” said Bernard.

He outlined how Microsoft is empowering its employees to think about environmental impact: An employee-suggested switch from Styrofoam cups to compostable dishware cut Microsoft’s annual waste stream by 50 percent. On the IT side, Bernard said Microsoft is focusing on the 2 percent of the world’s energy consumed by data centers and bringing Moore’s Law to them. Utilization of servers is one aspect of that, as well as offering IT professionals metrics to measure their progress with energy consumption. Bernard said only 15 percent of IT staffers have even seen their utility bills.

Taking the role of IT beyond data centers and into building management will also improve efficiency of buildings by about 30 percent Bernard said. About 37 percent of greenhouse gases come from buildings — something the Obama administration is hoping to address. In addition to bigger role for IT, Bernard talked about Microsoft’s efforts to help scientists gather data from a wide variety of sources and mash that up into a usable set of numbers so scientists can study larger issues, such as the widescale affects of climate change on water systems.