Airmiles “My Planet” eco Label page

 I got an email from Airmiles.ca summarizing a range of eco labels that we migh see on a day-to-day life - EnergyStar, EPEAT, WaterSense, and a whole lot more.  It’s great! You should check it out when you have time!

Obama’s Green Acheivements in 100 days

As much as we’re up in the “north”, Canadians really do care about what the US is planning in all areas of policy, including carbon!  Whether we follow US policy or develop our own set of policies is another matter, but whatever the Obama administration has/will have implement can affect us greatly.  This is a pretty good article summarizing what Obama has done in his first 100 days in the office.  I’ve extracted the summary section of it:

• Announcing plans to regulate coal-ash waste in the wake of last December’s catastrophic spill
• Signaling that they intend to take a closer look at permits for mountain-top removal, the controversial coal-extraction process (though they later made it clear that this should not be interpreted as eliminating the practice) 
• Cutting off funding for the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada
• Creating a Clean Energy Service Corps as part of the landmark expansion of AmeriCorps
• Streamlining the loan guarantee program at the Department of Energy, which gave out its first loanto a solar company on March 20
• Planting an organic White House vegetable garden.

I guess these initiatives are great, but haven’t really get down to the carbon business.  Carbon Tax?  Cap and Trade? Hybrid?  It’s interesting to see what’s going to happen!

Green IT for dummies

The “for dummies” series have also got into the “green” world.  After a previous posting discussing Elizabeth May’s book on Global Warming For Dummies, I came across a new book called Green IT for Dummies.  This is hot off the press, only published on April 14th, 2009.  An overview taken from Amazon.ca website listed the following main topics: 

• Green technology for computing hardware and software capable of reining in the costly, environmentally unfriendly waste that businesses and organizations generate;
• Focus exclusively on using green technology to help businesses improve their energy consumption and benefit the environment;
• Discusses topics such as power-management software, servers and storage solutions, datacenter cooling, virtualization and consolidation technology, smart tools for managing lighting, collaboration tools to reduce the need for travel, and more;
• This guide provides an overview of what green technology is, what problems it can (and can’t) solve, and how businesses or organizations might go about planning and implementing green technology solutions; and
• Also demonstrates how green technology will benefit the business with lower energy costs.

Maybe I’ll flip through it next time I’m at a Chapters….