Last fall’s Oracle OpenWorld had such a strong sustainability theme that I thought for sure I’d find products down in the exhibit hall. Not one. When I asked around, one guy even said sustainability management with BI tech “couldn’t be done.” (Read my TDWI story from back then.)

Now we see Terri Rylander’s post — she sees a “storm” brewing over this — getting six tweets. She deserves every one of them for extracting news from one muddy press release.

Companies are looking to BI tools for help with rising energy costs, says Dan Esty, co-author of Green into Gold and the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University.

In this slumping economy, he said yesterday, he’s seen companies defer advertising campaigns and factories in favor of investment in BI.

“They’ve concluded that there is a very substantial return on energy efficiency,” he said, “and the way you find that is with BI tools.”

Energy savings in companies he’s worked with, he said, are no less than around 10 to 15 percent, and have reached 60 percent. IT departments usually yield some of the most improvement.

Collecting the data is for most companies a problem. Will Sarni, CEO of Domani, says that even as companies have done a good job of rolling up their financial data, they’ve done a poor job of collecting energy data.

“You’d be surprised to see how archaic it is for some companies,” he said yesterday. “In some ways we’re still moving out of the Stone Age.”

There’s a big scramble now for tools that can be used easily within an organization to collect and understand and to make rational decisions—and that are relatively painless to use.

What’s missing most, he says, is a way to monitor company-wide energy consumption in real time.

Energy expense is becoming important in smaller and smaller companies. It used to be that an annual expense of less than $1 million was considered unimportant. “Now it’s significant.”

It’s a story in progress for BI This Week.

Oracle OpenWorld’s strong theme of sustainability made me wonder if I might find something green on the exhibit floor. I went to the usual BI vendors and asked about aiming BI tools at carbon footprints.

If there’s anything afoot, no one told the booth people. Most of them replied with some form of “Huh?” One guy, perhaps misunderstanding my question, actually told me it couldn’t be done. Too hard to collect the data, he said.

Over at MicroStrategy, someone finally had a promising answer. “Absolutely!” she said and referred me to the company’s PR manager. Dead end again: that spokesperson is “not aware” of any such application of their tools.

I await word from Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. But so far only SAS has supplied specifics. Plenty, in fact. Last April, they announced something they call SAS for Sustainability Management. It sounds impressive.

SAS is sure to have more competitors sooner or later. It just takes time for some business people to see the obvious.

BI is a natural. Though it’s good to be green, it’s more complex than putting up a bunch of windmills. All the disparate techniques and technology have to be rolled up into a big picture in a way that only BI can do it. Without BI, it’s all like the Web without Google. They’re just trees, not a forest.

Look to green, BI.

Wouldn’t you know it. Follow BI around long enough and you come across family—if only the kind of family you see at funerals and weddings. Oracle finally brought us together again with its sustainability theme at last week’s OpenWorld.

The Sierra Club and I used to be close. My mother led San Francisco Bay Chapter hikes, and much later I found myself deep in greenhood as an editor and organizer. So imagine my surprise, having left “home” so long ago, to witness one-time Sierra Club president Adam Werbach on a panel of environmentalists on a stage. They debated “the economy or the environment?”

The three of them—Werbach plus natural-capitalism advocate Hunter Lovins and Rainforest Action Network founder Randy Hayes—faced off with four business people, representing the supposed monolith once known at my house as the enemy.

I’d never noticed Werbach’s wide mouth. I noticed it as he smiled, which he did often up there hunched over at the table, making little jokes with Hayes and Lovins as the event began. All three seem accustomed to the stage. After all, public speaking is their lifeblood, their source. Their bodies and faces, all graying now, also signal certitude. They can joke because they are forgiven, like reconciled Catholics. Science is on their side, and so are most audiences, and they love it all.

I had to wonder, then, about the way Werbach blasted the guy from Fiji Water, purveyors of bottled water shipped to North America by tanker. Rob Six, VP of corporate communications, had dared to tout Fiji’s reduced carbon footprint as part of the solution. Werbach called that a “lie” because he felt it was actually a small reduction of extravagant waste.

Werbach is of the David Brower school of shooting for the stars. Brower, of course, was a great Sierra Club leader. As the club’s first executive director, he launched the book publishing operation. Make people see the natural wonders, he argued, and they’ll fight for them. So—the story goes—he grabbed a vast “fire fund” accrued over decades by leaders of the club’s rustic Clair Tappaan Lodge and used it for capital. The club never restored the fund, but business is business when you’re shooting for the stars.

If Werbach’s “lie” charge reminds you of Dick Cheney’s pooh-poohing of individual Californian’s ability to reduce power consumption significantly during the 2001 crisis, you’d be wrong. Cheney was just cynical. Werbach is just out to promote himself with noise.

Business is finally catching on. Green is going secular. You can thank Al Gore, Hunter Lovins, her ex Amory Lovins, Katrina or more likely writer Paul Hawken and others. You can turn away from Werbach and his fellow Dark Green leaders.

Fiji Water is not a poster child for sustainability, I know. But let’s appreciate what they’ve done. What else do you suppose they’re going to do, shut it all down? Sure, have the PR people draft one last letter to shareholders: “Here’s your money. Go invest in Green.”

We shoot for the stars because it’s inspiring. But while we’re at it, we wander among the street lights and shoot for the targets we can hit. So, Adam, don’t look down from your mountain and piss on those who try.