Last week, the Internet celebrated its 40th birthday! Forty glorious years that saw not just the transition from ARPANet to the now popular Internet but also Web 2.0 and what not! The Internet has been a revolution–in the making! The Internet that we know of today has been around for a little over a decade. That is also the time period when awareness and action on the “global” climate crisis has been phenomenal. And the link, evident!

According to the Internet Governance Forum, Internet consumes up to one trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, amounting to around 5% of the world’s total electricity consumption. The ‘tools’ of the IT sector are also manufactured using metals of various kinds. So the question remains, can Internet really help solve the climate crisis? The answer, on behalf of a generation grown up with the Internet, a firm Yes!

Here are five ways how Internet is helping fight climate change:

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The internet makes knowledge accessible, but at the end of the day it is about communications and connecting.  Global Green Links came to Mokugift, signed up to our corporate rewards program and became an affiliate in less time that it takes took us to figure out where to go for lunch.

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With the focus being shifted to creating a vehicle that meets people’s needs in conjunction with other modes of transport, the experience of driving it enhanced by currently useful information, and the profit centered on the services rather than the product itself, this is a radical shift from tightly reigned intellectual property, proprietary after market parts, and a rather slow development curve when it comes to becoming a truly green car.

The thinking about and creation of the c,mm,n car is being done both online and in person, with the three c,mm,n garages happening so far. 800+ people are on their wiki, with 80 actively participating in conception and design at the moment.

What’s the actual car like?

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B Cycle is the marriage of the concept of car sharing, as exemplified by Zipcar and the like, but even more simplified for instant gratification, with an attractive retro futuristic solar powered docking station, coupled with additional information to give greater substance to the experience of using a bike, like how many calories you burned and how much carbon you offset vs. driving your car.

B Cycle has yet to launch, and they’re using the web to do some of their market research for them while encouraging demand and perhaps evangelism by people wanting to get it in their area:

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Although politicians themselves may be relative newcomers in the world of communicating in 140-character or less, those who write about and study politics aren’t. And that goes for those who favor environmental politics, too.

What is to follow is by no means an exhaustive list. I’ve also left out those accounts that only RSS feeds (while recognizing their value). I’ve certainly left off a few that belong here, but I encourage you to add them below. Remember, this is not necessarily a “Best of”, but rather a few of the eco-political twitterers I find value in. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

10 twitter users you should follow:

@emilygertz The lead blogger at change.org’s Stop Global Warming blog, Emily Gertz’s work is all over the interwebs, including powerhouses like WorldChanging, Scientific American, and Grist.

@forestpolicy Deane Rimerman keeps the Forest Policy Research website updated with news and commentary about, you guessed it, forest policy. Good stuff.

@ghoberg I first came across Prof. Hoberg while doing some research on Canadian forest policy in grad school. Though relatively new to the twitterverse, his tweets are insightful and have even given me a few story ideas.

@greenskeptic Blogging the new green economy as The Green Skeptic since 2004, Scott Anderson lends his expertise on cleantech and social-entrepreneurial ventures, along with updates on his hoops game.

@grist More than just a twitterfeed, the folks at Grist.org have developed a nice mix of links and conversational tweets on their twitterstream. While the content at Grist is not entirely politics, the content at Gristmill pretty much is — and it rocks.

@kgrandia Kevin Grandia is the Managing Editor of DeSmogBlog and also Director of New Media for Hoggan and Associates in Vancouver, Canada. When he’s not clearing the PR pollution that hovers around climate debate, he’s tweeting about politics, society and life. Never mundane.

@revkin Andrew Revkin is a long time science writer for the New York Times and leads their Dot Earth blog in addition to his print duties. His tweets often offer little snippets of what he is currently writing/researching (thus giving his followers a taste of what they can expect in tomorrow’s Times).

@sheagunther Green Options co-founder and mainstay on the green blogosphere, Shea Gunther is now blogging at Mother Nature News; a project that is already garnering considerable attention.

@sustainablog Jeff Mcintre-Strasburg has been blogging at sustainablog since 2003, which I think is right around the time Guttenberg invented the blog. Co-founder and former Senior Editor at Green Options, Jeff has a PhD in English and more than once been my go-to guy when I get caught in a grammatic pickle.

@YaleE360 With some of the most respected thinkers and doers in science and the environment, the  YaleE360 website hit the ground running with some of the most thought-provoking environmental journalism on the net when it launched in the Summer of 2008.

Of course you can follow us on twitter at @redgreenandblue; or me, Tim Hurst, at @ecopolitologist, where I tweet about environmental politics and cleantech from my Green Options and ecopolitology work, along with other links I find worthy of sharing and the occasional personal tweets and twitpics.

Now it’s your turn. Who do you follow on twitter for environmental politics (broadly defined). Maybe people should be following you, that’s cool too, just tell us. Now’s your chance.

Image: carrotcreative via flickr

Such was the case for Evernote. It seemed so promising - a place to hold and make searchable all the random bits and pieces of your life, work, business. But for me, Delicious, with it’s simple interface and singularity of focus - tag enhanced bookmarking - fit and continues to fit the bill. For me.

And yet, last night when the internet was out, I began looking through the things I’d collected on Evernote - images of business cards, email articles from the network of Presidio, the sustainable MBA program I’m a graduate of, bits of wisdom from the web on management, and clips from articles I’d found about an advance in nighttime storage/alternate use of solar technology - all of which got me inspired to create new possibilities in my business, GreenSmith Consulting.

But it was the final, earliest note, that brought it all together.

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When I say the name Fiat, what comes to mind? If you’re American, the words, “Fix It Again, Tony” may come to mind, recalling the days when Fiats were a more common sight on these shores, and had a less than stellar reputation for reliability. But if you’re in Europe, a very different set of words may come to mind: Efficient. Stylish. Innovative.

Really?

Yes. The latest example of that is EcoDrive. What is it, aside from a catchy name? It’s an application that analyzes how you drive, and tells you how you can improve it. This backseat driver has a motivation: Helping you save gas, money, and reduce emissions, on vehicles whose average CO2 emissions are the lowest in Europe.

How?

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If I am coming across cloud computing on a daily basis, its clearly become mainstream. But, how exactly is cloud computing green?  Well, Kevin Jackson mused about this on his blog and asserts that The Economist provides the perfect answer:

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According to the saga, Coalfinger plans to cover the world in coal-fired power stations and destroy the climate, but the hero, Graverson Green is set upon stopping the super-villain with the help of his assistant Katrina Hurkane. Watch it:

This post contains additional media. Click here to view the full post.

“Although this is an animation, it greatly relates to the world we live in today. The use of coal for energy is having an incredibly negative effect on the climate, and like Coalfinger, many energy companies around the world are forging ahead with plans for new coal-fired power stations despite the evidence of their impact. Green, on the other hand, reminds us that we must work together to stop dirty coal plants and fight for clean and renewable energy.

The Arnold Palmer is an exceptional beverage. It takes two individual beverages, iced tea and lemonade, each very good in their own right, and creates an even better one. That’s how we feel about social media and green living i.e. sustainability.

There is nothing inherently green about social media. The Web 2.0 revolution is driven by code and the Internet as a platform. According to Wikipedia, it describes this as a trend in “technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” This is largely a virtual world.

The move toward sustainability, on the other hand, is taking place entirely offline in the actual world. It is about balancing our impact and more wisely managing our natural resources. The United Nations describes it as commitment to “the provision of a secure environmental, social, and economic future.”

As different as they are, these two trends share one key quality: they’re changing the world for the better. They are changing politics, business, culture, and society. In the following we explore 10 ways that the trends of social media and sustainability intersect as well as align.

Special Note: Sustainablog and Max Gladwell are supporting Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C). By clicking this link and signing up for SocialVibe, once featured in our Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media, you’ll effectively donate $1 to the cause. We also encourage you to watch the live telecast on ABC, CBS, and NBC, September 5th, at 8:00pm ET/PT.

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If you have been following politics on TV since last November, there’s a good chance you’ve watched Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) using an imaginary middle-class family as a rhetorical device to unify the Democratic message around this crucial target market. (note: if you object to comparing politics to marketing, keep in mind that Republicans have been using micro-niche issue targeting and other staple techniques from the marketing world for years, with great success)

At Green Options, when we build services and features, we hold ourselves to a similar standard: can my mother use this? Of course, I don’t expect my mom to get linked to our site through Digg and then add our RSS feed to her news aggregator (indeed, she’s never heard of Netvibes), but we try to make sure that all of the information we provide is accessible to not only the less green-savvy, but the less tech-savvy as well. At the same time, we do our best to make sure those users have the tools to understand terms like RSS and Web 2.0.

In the end, we know that all of the resources we provide won’t be right for all users, but we are confident that there is something useful or interesting for practically everyone, and we trust our users to decide for themselves what features and information they find useful.

Contrast our market-making philosophy with the multi-level marketing (MLM) approach taken by Citizenrē. Instead of giving users the resources to make their own energy and lifestyle choices through open information, independent ‘Ecopreneurs’ claim to provide a one size fits all solution: wait on buying solar panels today to get on a waitlist for renting them a few years down the road.

For those of us trying to build green markets now (especially solar energy), this pitch immediately raises two major concerns: lost consumer confidence in the solar industry if promises go undelivered, and the pre-empting of legitimate projects for solar installers by overzealous Citizenrē reps.

Over-hyped grand visions of a sudden MLM-based energy revolution are harmful at worst and apparently infeasible at best. The vast majority of ‘green collar’ professionals who spend their time in the details of building their industries understand that transforming our energy economy is (and will continue to be) a painstaking process.

I’m sorry to say that multi-level marketing will not be the hero of this story, at least not without having proven deliverables in place before initiating such a campaign. I may come to eat my words: it is possible that Citizenrē is just using MLM to prove consumer demand, and the word is out that the company will announce its investors and factory location a mere two weeks from now. But if I do, I’ll eat them happily, because it will mean that at least someone got through to the world.

While the rest of the solar industry obviously shares in the hope that (for example) solar energy’s market share will reach 25% by 2025, unsupported promises and unbridled enthusiasm are obviously not enough to get us there. Development is more likely to be accelerated by unexpected climactic, economic, or political events than by down-line residual sales commissions. Indeed, in their ebullience, Citizenrē executives appear not to take into account the complexities of implementing such a huge, vertically-integrated business plan—but at least they have a vision.

I was taught that a company’s vision statement should be defined by an ultimate, unachievable goal. Given the company’s robust projections and …interesting (for lack of a more judgmental word) ‘pyramarkting’ choices, Citizenrē’s goals certainly appear to be just that: unachievable.

But that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. One secretive company might not be able to do it, but a sea change in public perceptions certainly could. Grand visions of transformative change can and will spur innovative solutions, but only if we can help green markets grow in honest and transparent ways, and keep intact the trust of a cautious public.

Editor's note: Liam Rattray is one of Green Options' "rock star" interns. Liam and fellow intern Ryan Thibodaux (also one of our writers) were instrumental in getting Green Options launched on time!

Web 2.0 is the essential buzzword, everyone knows it, but not many people know what it actually is. Even industry specialists disagree over the definition of "Web 2.0", but most foresee it changing the way people interact with the internet and each other. This short post on Web 2.0 is centered around the visionary YouTube video entitled "Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us" (5 min) by Michael Wesch an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Kansas State University. If you haven't seen this video, zip on over to it using the good old fashioned hypertext link provided. In the time it takes you to watch this video 542 new blogs will have just been created throughout the world.

Now that you've experienced the wonder that is YouTube, I'll explain what Michael Wesch has brought up. The traditional form of written communication is text unilinearly printed on paper. This medium was, and still is in some podunk parts of society, used to convey one persons or a group of persons thoughts to a reader. It was terribly inefficient and multiple drafts of one document had to be written in order to achieve a copy that didn't have mistakes or parts that the author wished to move about.

In comes the digital age and bang! correctional fluid with the stroke of a button and the ability to move about pages of text with the twitch of a mouse. Computer text editing with applications like Open Office (much like Microsoft Office but $100s cheaper through the power of open-source) made writing and editing much faster and flexible. With this new technology scientists managed to exploit the idea of hypertext, an idea from the late 40s that envisioned a system that could automatically follow any citation in any document, and with the World Wide Web users could use hyper-textual links like those in this document to zoom around text in multiple directions.

These new documents were coded in a computer language called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, that allowed users to insert links and add formatting much like text editors allow you to do. However, HTML had many drawbacks because the language was used to define only the structure of the content of what you wrote, which meant that computers were unable to separate form from content easily.

In the late 90s a new language, XML or Extensible Markup Language, was developed. XML allows our documents information to be categorized and analyzed by computers by using tags, just as links are tags, to identify key parts like the title of the document and a simple description of it. XML has become the backbone of Web 2.0 and is what most Web 2.0 applications, or interactive websites, use to convey information.

Web 2.0 utilizes HTML and XML among many other internet and computer technologies to facilitate the movement of content online so that users can more easily collaborate and share information with others. This capability is utilized by a "second generation" of websites including social networking sites like Myspace that allow users to interact and keep in touch with friends online, social bookmarking sites like digg that allow users to share interesting links, wikis like Wikipedia that allow users to collaborate on and publish articles, applications like Google documents that allow you to do collaborative word and spreadsheet processing, podcasts that allow you to create, share, and consume independent original content, rss feeds that allow you to keep track of published works by organizations and individuals, and folksonomies like Flickr that allow you to classify an item, like a photograph or website, with a series of tags to create a massive user database of terms that describe an item. The creation of all of this content has been even more streamlined with the invention of the blog. Blogs allow people, just like you, to write and publish whatever they wish online using simple online applications like WordPress that allow you to publish a website without ever touching code. To do this with video is called vlogging. Database technologies, the languages that transfer information between them, and most importantly- you, the user and creator and consumer of content are what is driving this new internet paradigm.

The real benefit of Web 2.0 is that all of these web applications allow you to tap into the collective intelligence of millions of people. Ever hear that two heads are better than one? Web 2.0 is that taken to the extreme!

Here's a list of some great Web 2.0 sites to get you started:

Social Networking: for the building and maintaining of online and offline social networks between friends, family, and work-mates. For a full list go here.

Myspace- the classic general social networking site

Facebook- originally for students, but now everyone!

LinkedIn- for business professionals

Stumbleupon- social networking for surfing the web

Care2- social networking for green living and activism

Social Bookmarking: used to share and recommend online bookmarks

Del.icio.us- allows you to publish all of your bookmarks in a simple list, the bookmarking standard

Newsvine- social bookmarking for news

Digg- one of the larger bookmarking sites used primarily for technology related topics

Technorati- social bookmarking for blogs

Reddit- a simple social bookmarking site

Hugg- bookmarking for green living and environmental news

Stumbleupon- is also used for bookmarking

Metafilter- really good stuff.

Wiki: "is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration." -Wikipedia. Wikis can be found on almost every topic here.

Wikipedia- a very comprehensive encyclopedia

Appropedia- green wiki

Intellipedia- a wiki that the US intelligence community uses…I couldn't find the link (imagine that…!)

And, of course, Green Options' own Green Life Guide 

Podcasts: a media file, video or audio, that is distributed by a subscription, typically via RSS feeds, for playback on televisions, computers, or portable media players. News, special interests, television shows, and movies can all be found through podcasts. They can be found on every imaginable subject through these directories.

Media Sharing: websites that allow the free movement of media

Flickr- for photographs

YouTube- for video

OurMedia- for grassroots media and news

RSS Feeds: subscriptions that allow you to automatically collect websites, articles, podcasts, and other media by using a RSS Aggregator like these

Netvibes- a fantastic online aggregator, as well as a thousand other things

Shrook- the free desktop aggregator for Macs

Bloglines- an online aggregator for blog subscriptions

AggCompare- a directory of other aggregators