I’m doing research for an article about green computing. Here is just a jumble of great stuff I’ve been finding.
Texas consumes more fuel generated from coal & petroleum than any US state. Per capita, Texas is 5th in energy consumption (behind Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana & North Dakota). Curiously, CA & NY per capita energy consumption is 50% of Texas. (Source: EIA)
Summary of Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency. Tax credits are available at 30% of the cost of purchases, with $1500 on most items but no upper limit on big ticket items.
Texas may be backwards in some respects, but the Texas Comptroller produced in 2008 a kickass document about Texas energy. Links to the rest of the document are on the blue box to the right.
U.S. college students could save more than 2.3 billion kW hours per year of electricity by enabling power saving features on their desktop PCs. That equals an annual savings of more than $200 million in energy costs and a 1.8 million-ton reduction of CO2 emissions from the operation of computers –equivalent to taking more than 350,000 cars off the road. (Here’s how). (Source).
Triplepundit, a news blog about green technology
Green data Center blog. (I talked to him yesterday for my article!)
Here’s an Energy Star certification process for Servers and Data Centers.
Climate Change Computing Blogs. Here’s an RSS of all of them. Cool, this RSS came from a yahoo pipes aggregator script. Sweet!
Global Warming Bingo, a game to play for pieces about global warming. The post was written several years ago, but the references are current.
Here’s a list of green-e certified carbon offsetters.
Greenpeace tips on energy efficiency.
Sharon Begley profile of Al Gore for his new book. Begley writes some of the most well-informed pieces about global warming. In fact, aside from maybe George Will, Newsweek has become a much spiffier mag since it dropped the weekly schedule. A sample:
He (Gore) regales you with numbers: more CO2 is emitted from burning and destroying forests—20 to 23 percent of the annual total—than from all the world’s cars and trucks; only by the 1980s did CO2 from fossil fuels overtake that from deforestation, which accounts for 40 percent of the CO2 increase since the 1800s.
The potential for soils to absorb more of the CO2 that our utilities, factories, and vehicles spew poses a dilemma for Gore, one of two where his scientific and political instincts collide. With better management, soils could sequester much more carbon than they do now. The question is how much more. Soils scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University was surprised to get a call last summer ("Vice President Gore would like to talk to you") that began, "I have 15 or 20 questions about soils and climate for you." Lal calculates that if more farmers adopted mulching, no-till farming, and the use of cover crops and manure, 3,700 million acres worldwide could sequester 1 gigaton per year of CO2, roughly 12 percent of annual global emissions. Other experts are even more sanguine. "If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit," says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. The political clash is this: if you tell people soils can be managed to suck up lots of our carbon emissions, it sounds like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and could decrease what little enthusiasm there is for reducing those emissions—as one of Gore’s assistants told LaSalle in asking him to dial down his estimate. (He didn’t.)
This is the first time I preordered a book from Amazon. Gore’s book may not be the definitive source for climate change, but he has the access and time to find out who has the best insights into the subject. Oddly, it never occurred to the publisher to release an ebook version.
