Computing can’t really help the environment with its world-wide power consumption but there are many ways you can minimise the impact you have.
Free carbon offsetting from Greenvoice
Greenvoice (review) is supposed to be a central point for every environment-related! If you sign up today, they’ll pay for 2 hours of CO2 offsetting daily for your home PC!
Whilst 2 hours isn’t enough for a typical user like myself, every little helps. I also doubt this offer will last when Greenvoice expands but I’d like to see an option allowing me to pay for offsetting for my computing and my share of my shared hosting! Hosts like Dreamhost (use the WEBBYSWORLD promocode!) are carbon neutral.
Use Google and have a CRT monitor?
Mark Ontkush estimates that if Google was white on black instead of the other way around, somewhere between 750 and 1500 megawatt hours would be saved annually (consider that the peak output of a 100m high wind turbine is ~=2 megawatts). Savings only exist for CRT monitors, though, because LCD monitors have the backlight on regardless. Whilst the odds are you’re using a TFT monitor, I’m not and neither are 50% of China!
Many implementations of a Black Google now exist, my personal favourite being Blackle (which claims to have saved 0.16Mwh). It is also a nifty way for people to make profit as you could generate AdSense for Search revenues. There are also Greasemonkey (or GM variant) userscripts which darken Google.
Something that perhaps would be useful would be a dark version of Chinese search giant Baidu. I can’t find any besides this userscript.
Have a TFT monitor? Make your searches help charity!
Y!-powered Goodsearch is a search engine which allows you to select a charity - you could choose an environmental one - and for every search you make with them they’ll pay that charity US$0.01.
Goodsearch is US centric, though, and we Brits might find every click better. every click, in my opinion, is more attractive but isn’t powered by the best search engine (Ask.com). They donate 50% of their gross revenue to charities (awarded proportionately to users supporting that charity). Oblatoo, which is Google powered but is currently down, is another British one which donates GB£0.01 to charity per search (slightly more generous the Goodsearch at today’s exchange rate!).
This post has a list of 15 charity search engines.
Shop and have carbon offsetted
GoCarbonFree is a site which claims it will pay for carbon offsetting if you shop through sites its an affiliate of (via. their links). You could offset anywhere between 100 and 900g of CO2 per pound spent depending on how much they make.
For example, per pound you spend at Apple Store, 100g of carbon (equivalent to a lightbulb being on for 14 hours) will be offset. So if I end up buying a MacBook Pro, I could offset 130kg of my carbon!
When you join GoCarbonFree, you will have 400g of carbon offset immediately.
I am struggling to find a similar American service; sorry Yankees!
Use carbon neutral companies
OK, not so Web 2.0 but an obvious answer is to use companies which are carbon neutral or are striving to become so such as HSBC, Google, Yahoo!, Tesco and Nike.
It’s worth point out that lots of environmentalists don’t believe carbon offsetting is an effective way of fighting global warming and is simply a ‘red herring’. Reducing the carbon you produce in the first place is much better :).
Tags: environment, web 2.0, carbon offsetting, global warming, climate change
I installed the Stylish add-on and went for the dark grey theme. Mostly, I just use my address bar for Google searches, though, so that already saved one white page view. However, getting black results is pretty cool.
Thanks for the linkup Joe, we’ll continue to offset carbon of new users even when we get big
If we really want to reduce our emission of CO2 then changing our computing habits isn’t enough. Most of the emissions actually come from industry and transport.