How you can make a difference to global climate

Do you know how much energy your are wasting? Do you know what damage your CO2 emissions are doing to your home? Since climate change has become an important subject these days, people are trying to figure out how to turn the tide (quite literally). To help answering those questions Jay Barnes set-up EnergyRace.com which allows you to track how well you and your peers are doing saving our planet.

Just fill in a quick profile about yourself and the website will calculate estimate your emissions. The profile is quick and simple yet is currently only really useful for USA citizens. I’ve emailed them to make the point that this is a global problem and they are disabling the rest of the World from participating. Anyways, back to changing the planet on a different front. After choosing my habitat type (i.e. apartment/flat), household members and car make and model it’s time to save the planet.

The “make changes” part of their site is quite nice and provides you with tips on how to lower emissions based on your profile choices. For example, I drive a car and the website encourages me to keep the air conditioner / climate control of when I don’t need it, make sure my tires are inflated to the right level or leave the car at home for a few times a week. By accepting the tips the website starts calculating your savings and displays them in your “impact tree”.

It’s good to see EngeryRace.com’s use of the viral nature of the Internet by encouraging users to invite their friends and make changes together (i.e. car pooling like Ralf and I do every morning). Actually when was the last time you left your car at home and cycled to the shops or work?

You will see how much trouble you are causing in your “impact tree” and can display your savings through a banner on your website or blog, which encouraged me to join up because I want to beat Scott Jehl who designed the site. Especially because he’s American and we Europeans are so much kinder to our environment

Here’s how much I reduced my emissions by, and I didn’t even do half of what I could!

So, what are you doing to stop killing our future?

Edit (13/4/07-1): Jay emailed me back and pointed out that it’s a mammoth task finding all the relevant background data on consumption, etc. If you have this data or a link to a resource please help out and email it to Jay at energyrace dot com.

Edit: (13/4/07-2): Jay posted a response on his blog saying he thinks the US is far behind other countries in Europe, and that opening EnergyRace.com up to include people outside the US would be a big burden. I would agree but with enough involvement from the “community” I don’t think it’s an unsurmountable task

Also, Andre posted a quick note on his as well. His site is about similar topics of interest than mine (videos, viral marketing, social networking, etc). So have a look

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 14:59 and is filed under English, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.