Green Options

Mokugift was inspired by Marion Cotillard (2007 Oscar) to launch a program that enables actors, musicians and athletes to inform, inspire and empower fans to plant trees with them. Mokugift has found a base within the hip hop community that has always been environmentally conscious.

Google wants to help folks use less power by empowering them with real time information about their energy usage.

[Remix of a Creative Commons photo by John Wilson]

There’s a famous quote from Lord Kelvin: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” When it comes to lowering your energy consumption, Google says, “You CAN measure it, you CAN improve it.” Folks who monitor their home energy usage are, on average, able to reduce their consumption by 5-15%. That adds up! For every six households that save the median amount of energy through monitoring, it’s the equivalent of taking one car off the road. Imagine if, instead of just six, there were millions of households! That’s Google’s plan.

[image via Danny Sullivan]

As part of its tenth birthday celebration, Google is putting out a call for ideas and promising to fund the ones that it thinks will help the most people. Submissions are due by October 26th, and voting starts in late January. The web giant plans to spend up to $10 million to fund the five winning ideas. They’re calling it Project 10^100th, shorthand for ten to the 100th power which equals, you guessed it, a Googol!

The thinking behind the Project 10^100th is that everyone has good ideas for helping other folks out, but maybe they don’t have the means to make it happen. From the 10 to the 100th website:

At Google, we don’t believe we have the answers, but we do believe the answers are out there. Maybe in a lab, or a company, or a university — but maybe not.

Maybe the answer that helps somebody is in your head, in something you’ve observed, some notion that you’ve been fiddling with, some small connection you’ve noticed, some old thing you have seen with new eyes.

More details after the jump!

How do you get your kids to care more about and take action on improving the environment, when the world they’re focused on is on their iPod, their Wii, their phone, and online? If you’re SustainLane, you meet them where they are, and create a web based animation series and also show it on TV, on Earth Day Television.

Gorilla  in the Greenhouse, an episodic show premiering today, doesn’t preach at kids, but instead engages them on their terms and empowers them to take action. Animated by the people behind such web classics as The Meatrix, it features four smart kids and a wise green gorilla, facing the big green challenges of our day, with inventiveness, action, and most importantly, a rockin’ song.

Not many people could pull off making a catchy tune about a garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, but in the first episode, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” they show otherwise. With people such as Ralph Guggenheim, one of Pixar’s founders producing, this moves beyond merely being entertainment to being a bridge to further conversation with your children about things happening in the real world, and what can be done about them.