Blogs

Uh oh…the competition is heating up. Fake Steve is getting things rev’ed up at (fake) Apple: _“After seeing Arnold on the cover of Newsweek touting his big commitment to the global warming cause, I said you know what? That’s it. We’re going green. We’re gonna be greener than everyone else in the world put together. No more losing out to Lenovo and Dell on this one. No more fighting Greenpeace. To hell with it.

On Friday I asked about relative environmental impact of buying a new, more efficient car versus driving the old one. I got some good comments and emails, so thought I’d respond to a few here. A couple of people commented that they didn’t believe the idea that a new car wouldn’t be built if someone opted not to buy one. In the case of single person, that may be true (although I’d disagree with that as well), but in the case of a more widespread change in behavior, its patently not true.

Here’s a question I’ve been wondering about: If I upgrade my car to a brand new one that’s more efficient, I save energy and emissions based on the miles I drive with the new vehicle. However, a lot of energy went into making and delivering the new vehicle, and, in theory, that energy wouldn’t have been spent if I didn’t buy a new car. So how big of a MPG increase do I need to get before it’s at least environmentally break even?

I suppose I should follow Jonathan’s lead and Twitter this, but here’s a bunch of tidbits from the last week or so in an old fashioned blog posting: I’m a huge reader and fan of Worldchanging, so was happy that we could help out when they needed a new server. So I’m happy to announce that as of this week, Worldchanging is running on an ultra-efficient SunFire T1000 server. Check out the logo on the bottom right of the page!

Just discovered that the Douglas Fir was actually named after a guy named David Douglas! Cool history and link to the history of the Sierra Club, whose magazine I’m featured in this month. (I don’t, however, envy his death, other than the Hawaii part)

I wanted to respond to Tom Arnold’s comment to my last entry in a new post as opposed to a comment, as I thought it had some important points that I wanted to bring out. First, I was clearly making a generalization, and like all generalization this one has some counterexamples. It was unfortunate that I picked on a blog post from Terrapass, as they are, in mind, the most prominent counter to many of the issues I see with carbon offsets.

So we’ve been looking at Dell’s Plant a Tree for Me program (last post is here), and see that a) it is doing most of its good far out in the future, versus now, when it is needed, and b) can’t scale to the size of Dell’s business at the current price of carbon offsets. This leads to the obvious question: instead of planting trees, why not do something that scales and that will offset the carbon this year?

From WorldChanging: Costa Rica Aims to Become First “Carbon Neutral” Country. As you can probably tell, my team is working a lot on Sun’s energy and carbon strategies. While I don’t know the details of Costa Rica’s plans, it appears to be pretty direct. It probably helps to be 108th on the list of emitters, and to still have lots of forest to work with, but I’m sure there are still challenging aspects to it.

Happy Daylight Savings Day! Here’s the energy/environment rationale for the change (from a CNN article): _“The energy savings would translate into a 10.8 million-metric-ton reduction in carbon emissions over the next 13 years, Markey said, citing an analysis by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. … While 10.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions may sound like a lot, it pales in comparison to the 5.9 billion metric tons the United States emitted just in 2004, according to the U.

So, after a short break, we’re back to our examination of Dell’s Plant a Tree for Me program (earlier posts are here: 1, 2, 3 and 4). In the beginning I asked whether the program is really capable of doing what it says it can, namely removing the CO2 that results from powering Dell PCs. I identified four areas of concern, and we’ve touched on two of them. Today’s focus is on the scalability of the program, or, in other words, if it’s successful, can it really keep up with the volume of CO2 that is generated.