Archive for the ‘Carbon’ Category

If you pay someone to destroy greenhouse gases, they would never intentionally produce an excess, would they? Methinks I smell a rat.

Fire the neighbor kid and just buy yourself a goat. Your lawn will thank you.

Meet the Habbits, strangely distorted humanoids that wear their environmental impact on their sleeve whole body. Rather than limiting themselves to just a carbon footprint, Habbits have a carbon head-print, hand-print, “bum”-print, etc. The relationship goes something like this: Height – Total Carbon Footprint Feet – Transport Hands – Home Energy Mouth – Water Bum [...]

Call me a luddite, but I just don’t know if I’m ready for Twitter.  I mean, I get the concept of micro-blogging, and I certainly have a lengthy backlog of links and stories that I’ll never have time to macro-blog about, but is there real value in the hit-and-run style of Twitter? According to Peter [...]

I love it when someone visualizes data in a new way, and if it’s IRL (in real life) rather than on the computer screen, all the better. That’s the volume of one metric ton of carbon dioxide.  27 feet x 27 feet x 27 feet. Now, I just have to figure out a way to [...]

An ecometric roundup for everyone’s favorite smoke spewing Icelandic volcano. First off, a map from the New York Times showing the airport closures and ash coverage: You’ll notice that the Icelandic airport remains ironically open. I’d be remiss if I did not at least briefly cover the climate impacts of the current eruption.  Traditionally, volcanic [...]

This just in: Smokey the Bear had it all wrong.  Now it seems that only YOU can cause forest fires. There’s mounting evidence that our fire suppression program over the last few decades has actually made forest fires worse. Instead of allowing frequent, smaller burns that remove brush and tinder from the forest floor, we allow [...]

Great news!  Carbon emissions in the US were down 3% in 2008, and are likely to trend even lower in 2009, according to a study published by the EPA. Of course, it’s a little like congratulating a sick person on losing weight – positive effect, but a decidedly negative cause. According to the LA Times, [...]

Just when you thought it was safe to trade carbon credits via the German Emissions Trading Authority, hackers make off with your eco-loot! Through a classic “please click this link and login to verify your account” phishing scheme, hackers acquired the credentials of some major firms and transferred $4 million worth of carbon offsets into [...]

It’s a perfect storm for developers of carbon accounting software: a brand new market, social and political pressure to comply, and a low barrier to entry.  And it’s worse than I thought. A recent LinkedIn discussion pointed out that there are over 60 vendors offering carbon accounting solutions.  That seems like a lot to me, [...]