carbon emissions

Online Retailers: Help Your Customers Offset Their Carbon Emissions

jplatt — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:00:00 -0400

Studies have shown that shopping online is, on average, greener than driving around and shopping at a bunch of retail stores. But even shopping online creates carbon emissions, and many people feel guitly about buying anything that needs to be shipped.

GreenWorld's ShopGreen can help alleviate that buyer's remorse.

ShopGree is a free program that online retailers can download and install. It integrates with your shopping experience, and gives your customers the opportunity to make a voluntary additional contribution -- up to 1% of their total purchase -- to offset the carbon emissions created by the shopping exerpience.

In addition to paying a little bit extra, ShopGreen gives your online customers a very powerful user experience, allowing them to see how much carbon their shopping creates, and what is being done to offset it:

Customers receive tracking ID numbers that can be used to view records of their carbon offset investments at any time
They can also see statistics that show the cumulative ShopGreen™ impact for your site therefore and increase the likelihood of future transactions

How does it work? GreenWorld is working with EcoSecurities, "a company in the business of sourcing, developing and trading carbon offsets from greenhouse gas emission reduction projects throughout the world, to offer both Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) and Verified Emission Reductions (VERs) from a range of domestic and international projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including renewable energy, energy efficiency, forestry and methane capture."

So if you've got an online business, and want to do a little bit of good for the environment every time you sell something, give GreenShop a try. It might add a lot to your customer experience, and earn you some customer loyalty in return.

What is a Smart Grid?

jplatt — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0400

President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan includes US$4.5 billion to create a "smart grid" electrical transmission system. But many people still ask, what exactly is a smart grid?

Basically, a "smart grid" really is just that -- it's a smarter version of our national energy grid that uses advanced communication tools and a whole new range of computing technologies to make the transmission and distribution of energy more efficient.

The first step would involve deploying an infrastructure that will automate electricity metering. This is more than just putting the guy who comes to your house to read your meter out of a job. It creates a two-way communication system between customers and utilities, allowing everyone to see how much their energy use is costing them on a second-by-second basis. For instance, you'll be able to decide if you want to run your dishwasher in the afternoon, when rates are higher, or at night, when you can see that rates are lower.

The smart grid will also improve the adoption of renewable energy sources. Let's say you install solar panels on your roof, and they actually generate more electricity than you need. With a smart grid, you'll be able to sell your excess energy back to the utility and upload it into the national electrical grid.

It will also make it easier to generate electricity from wind and solar in one part of the country, and then transmit it thousands of miles to a completely different part of the country. That's not possible with today's antiquated grid, which is not set up to transmit energy long-distance.

Theoretically, a smart grid would create enough efficiences that it would actually reduce carbon emissions by 25%.

We're not going to see a smart grid tomorrow, but this technology isn't too far off, if we allow it to come to being. All it takes is willpower, and a lot of money. But think of what we'll save when it comes to pass.

Fight Climate Change, Win $75,000

jplatt — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:00:00 -0500

Got an idea to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions? The Forum for the Future wants to hear about it. They have teamed with the Financial Times for the new Climate Change Challenge competition, which seeks innovatitive, practical ideas that can be implemented quickly and create real change.

The $75,000 prize for the top idea has been sponsored by HP. The winner will be expected to use the prize money to help make their idea a reality.

What is the competition looking for? Any good idea that has already made it off the drawing board will do: "We want to find ideas that are below the radar – being developed by think-tanks, academic institutions or individual entrepreneurs – and identify those that can be taken to scale quickly and make a real difference. We will be scouring the world for the most exciting low-carbon ideas. These could be new technologies, systems or services, novel organisations or business models."

Forum for the Future will collect and review all the entries, and then pick 12 of the most promising ideas to a panel of judges, including Sir Richard Branson and other business and environmental leaders. Five of those ideas will then be published in the Financial Times this March for reader voting. The winning idea will be announced in April 2009.

Interested in entering? Don't delay. The deadline is January 30, 2009.

How to Talk to Your Kids about Global Warming

ProgressiveKid — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:58:22 -0400

A woman I know lives with her family in a house that backs up against a forest. The forest is being clear cut, a not so infrequent occurrence in this part of the country. One day, while the woman was on a business call in the house, her nine-year-old son rounded up his two younger brothers, and the three of them marched out onto the logging road and stood in front of an oncoming logging truck. The truck driver managed to stop in time. At the children’s request, the driver wrote down on a piece of paper the name of the logging company.

The four boys then returned home, and the oldest went to interrupt his mother’s phone call. He told his mother what they had done and said he would keep doing it until she and his father did something to stop what was happening to the planet. He explained to his mother that he and his brothers were the ones who would be living through most of the effects of climate change, but that they needed their parents to help them since they were just children.

The mother got the message. She turned to some friends, and together they formed a climate change response team at their kids’ school. The school now has a series of events and activities planned for the next school year. And they met with some other friends and acquaintances. All of us started Earth Kids Organized (EKO), a networking site and organizational model to help children, parents, and schools and other institutions across the planet communicate and work together to increase their power and effect.

Out of the Mouths of Kids

The point here is that kids know. They already, by age nine and younger, get what is happening, they want to do something about it, and they understand that they need help. But many of our climate change responses are adult centered and exclude kids from the action, which seems downright unfair given that our kids are the ones who are inheriting this situation.

Schools and libraries are logical places to base many kid-focused and kid-led efforts to respond swiftly and effectively to climate change. One elementary school is, at the request of the students, plowing over a grassy play area to make an organic fruit and vegetable garden. A middle school is working with a local organic farm to institute organic lunches one day a week. That same farm is working with local parents to institute organic farming camps for kids this summer. At another middle school library, students have formed one club to care for injured and homeless animals and another club to help the school compost. Two students at this school are making a documentary about the decline of a salmon stream.

Efforts like EKO are important because they expand the reach of children beyond the narrow confines of their own institutions and link children in a wider area, giving them a greater sense of hope and community. Families too need to feel that their efforts are not isolated and unique to their own homes. Joining other families in school- or community-based efforts can give everyone a sense of empowerment and even relief that people are responding appropriately to this crisis.

Five Kid-Sized Steps

Lowering your carbon emissions is important but it is just as important to involve your children in climate change conversation, research, and wider action. Consider taking the following steps at home and at school or the library with your children:

Read together about climate change. Look for Julie’s upcoming book A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids (Green Goat Books, August 2007) as a good place to start. Be sure to talk about what you have read.
Create a culture of empathy toward all living things. Don’t kill spiders and flies. Relocate them outside if necessary using a bug vac. Don’t use toxic cleaning or lawn care products. Talk about and look for evidence of the animals, plants, and trees that share the space where you live. Turn your yard or school grounds into a Certified Wildlife Habitat.
Get involved in something bigger. Help your kids start or join a climate change response team at their school or other local insitution.
Get involved in something even bigger. Join EKO or another environmental group with a broad focus. The Internet is a great tool for this level of networking.
Socialize with similarly engaged people. Your kids need to feel like they’re not alone in their concerns for and work for the planet. Make sure that at least some of what you do in response to climate change is social. Picnics, potlucks, and informational fairs can make this uneasy business something that we and our children can live with better and more healthfully.

We’re not protecting our children from anything by keeping them out of the business of responding to global warming. They already know and they’re worried. The ways to ease their anxiety are (1) to show them that we are doing something about it and (2) to involve them. Besides, some of the most creative people I know are kids—maybe the answers to many of the planet’s problems rest in some smaller-sized hands.

By Sarah at ProgressiveKid

New Devices Measure Your Carbon Footprint

jkraft — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:13:52 -0400

It’s fashionable these days to measure your carbon footprint using any number of online calculators. But most of these rely on your guesstimates about how often you travel and the cost of your energy bills. Once you know your carbon footprint, you may choose to buy offsets, but you might not know exactly how to reduce your emissions.

But new technologies will soon change how we track our impact on the planet and will allow us to instantly green our behavior. By hooking up household appliances to a domestic dashboard, we can see real-time energy use and change our patterns of consumption. Like a speedometer in the car or a scale in your bathroom, household measuring devices are the best way to maintain control over your energy consumption. Visualization can lead to big savings on energy costs, too!

The Palo-Alto based company Agile Waves has recently launched the Resource Monitor, which constantly tallies up electric, gas, and water consumption of a home or office and reports your consumption on a built-in touchscreen interface also available on the web. The device accumulates data over time, so you can compare one day to another, and judge the performance of certain appliances.

British company Onzo has also produced a device as sleek as an iPod that helps you think about when to turn your lights off, how to change your cooking methods, and how to switch your energy supplier. Onzo also has an online interface where you can compare your house’s stats with your friends’. Their beta testing has revealed that consumers can save between 6.5% and 26% on energy costs just by staying in tune with Onzo.

Quick Trips Call for the E-Bike

jplatt — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:00:00 -0400

Do you really need a car for every trip you take? What about that quick drive to the Post Office, or to visit your neighbor a few streets over? Do you have to burn fossil fuels to get there by car?

No, you don't. You could walk, you could ride a bike, or you could turn heads by trying an electric bicycle.

E-bikes (as they are often called) are just like normal bicycles, but they come equipped with rechargable batteries that can keep them going on their own power for around 10-20 miles, depending on the model you're riding. You can switch at any time between battery power and good old-fashioned pedal power, so you can also get your exercise while you're zipping around town.

E-bikes are growing in popularity around the world as more and more people try free themselves from high oil prices. It's been said that there are more than 10 million e-bikes on the road, and some say sales are expected to double this year.

The bikes come in all shapes and sizes, and with a wide variety of features. Depending on what you want out of an e-bike, you can pay as little as $300 and all the way up to $2,000 or more. If you already have a bike, you can even purchase a conversion kit to electrify it.

A few tips: First, look for a bike using NiMh or Lithium Ion batteries. They cost more, but they weigh less, last longer, and can be recharged many more times. Second, try to keep the total weight of your bike under 50 pounds, so you get the most out of your battery. Third, check the laws in your local community. Most states treat e-bikes the same as bicycles, but California has its own rules (doesn't it always), and you don't want to get in trouble when you're trying to do the right thing for the environment.

Return To Simplicity

jchatraw — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Growing up in the low country of South Carolina, I dreamed of living in Atlanta. Yes, minutes away from a smorgasbord of my favorite pro sports teams. Mostly I just yearned to live in a place that was bustling with activity with as many people as the cotton plants I worked with each summer. Then I moved there after graduating from college ...

Cue the sound effect: a record screeching to a halt.

Horns honking. Dense smog. Mass of humanity. Allergens that envelope you. And with the exception of the Braves, the rest of my childhood teams have all but gone the way of the woolly mammoth. I probably should've realized the big city wasn't the utopia I thought it was when my first day on the job in Atlanta my boss said, "Get yourself good insurance and a good allergist—because you will get in a wreck and you will have allergies." She was right on both accounts.

What I've learned is that there is no utopia. However, for someone seeking to go green without the luxury of lots of green, downsizing to another community is the way to go. When it comes to being ecologically conscious, my wife and I found our almost-utopia in Boise, Idaho.

My current green lifestyle consists of reducing my carbon emissions by pedaling my bike to work along the city's glorious Green Belt, buying cart loads of locally grown produce and searching for an energy efficient home. And hours of pondering about what steps to take next. I'm on a journey of discovering what it means to live green and how best to do my part to a planet that desperately needs more of us. I hope others will find my trip encouraging and inspiring—that living green can be done and done now.