Green Options

Sean Daily, Green Living Ideas’ Editor-in-Chief, talks with Chris Page, Director of Climate and Energy Strategy of Yahoo! Green, about new Yahoo! announcements, the corporation’s commitment to carbon neutrality, and the specifics of achieving neutrality on a corporate level through carbon projects and third party [...]

In the Spring on Ecolocalizer we featured the start of the Yahoo! Green “Make it Green” Competition. Now with only one week left, the possibilities for new entries are endless. If you have a brilliant eco-creative idea, and want to see it manufactured for real, then enter now. Yahoo! Green explains:

“the best ideas will be made into real products and stocked on real shelves. The innovator will get a share of the sales for 20 years, plus $2,500 and possibly an appearance on PBS’s Everyday Edisons.  It’s a great way to turn an idea into reality.  For this last week, we’re waiving the submission fee.   We’ve had more than 110 ideas submitted and 10,000 votes from the community.”

So what is most popular idea so far? Well,

Are you like millions of others who assume that an online business, just by virtue of being online, translates to having a lower carbon footprint? If so, then you are in for a shock. Although this is a fairly common assumption, the truth is that internet powered businesses often have a higher energy consumption requirements than offline businesses and so might have a long way to go before they can become green.

A federal judge has stopped Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to clean up the air in New York City by using fuel-efficient hybrid taxis.

1. Breathe Deep: Use breath awareness to relax as yoga master Rodney Yee shows you a seated breathing pose. Feel at ease all day long by taking stretching and breathing breaks. Kundalini yoga, for example, is one of the best guided breathing classes you can take to harmonize your mind, and body and clear away negative energy so we get back to feeling good.
2. Notice Emotions: The golden key to unlocking negative stress is becoming aware of how we hold it in the body. Watch how Deepak Chopra explains that stress is an important aspect of life and we can learn to transform it into a positive force.
3. Meditate: Healthy living site Lime offers a Meditation Room to help

Do you hope to be happy, smiling and ready to make change in the world? Well, here are some helpful mood boosting tips to help us reach those happy goals:

1. The Things to Be Happy About site (shown above) shares quotes to lift your mood daily. This is one of my favorite sites because of the open knowledge sharing and fun approach to each topic.

2. In recently reading about resilience on Yahoo I learned: “You need to know what resilience is so that you can remember that you have it. Resilience is an emotional muscle that can grow with use and practice — or atrophy if ignored.” The simplest way to go beyond your comfort zone is to learn a new skill. Here are some more key take-aways about finding resilience:

A year after having first noticed the green ‘cyber’wave, months after informing the world about Global Internet giants going green and weeks after being appointed as the new Moderator of the Delhi Freecycle Network(TM) group, the green ‘cyber’wave just got stronger. And Yahoo! has taken the lead. Starting Earth Day, it is not just spreading the message, “Free is good - Give stuff, get stuff. Do good for the environment” through its green pages, but is also working to achieve the same.

What does it take to encourage, empower, or help an office go green?

How about a touch-screen kiosk with real-time energy usage and tools to see your individual impact? Yahoo! has unveiled the Green Screen where employees can play with data to see how much energy they could save with simple changes around the office. If successful, Yahoo! hopes to spread this power(ful) tool from the cafeteria of their Sunnyvale headquarters to their other campuses so employees can discover how easy habits, like turning off that monitor, can make a big difference.

Just how green is the Internet? Going virtual has the potential to save significant amounts of energy, with a recent study predicting that Internet services could reduce carbon emissions by staggering 1 billion tons.

But look beyond the green hype, and the web has a dark secret - at the other end of your Internet cable, humming away, and hidden from sight, are thousands of energy hungry datacenters, running 24/7 and estimated to be using energy equivalent to all of the color televisions in the US. Worldwide datacenter energy usage has doubled since 2001 and is set to double again by 2011.

Google is today’s biggest datacenter operator, having more than twice the server capacity of any other firm in the world, but this could be set to change. The proposed merger of Microsoft and Yahoo would create a rival Internet giant with similarly huge capacity, creating new competition at many different levels.

Can your search engine offset your carbon footprint? How about funding breast cancer research, environmental conservation, or pubic schools? Calling all web surfers: don’t miss these easy opportunities for everyday activism.

How it works

In 2006, an estimated $24.4 billion was spent on Internet advertising. (CBS, ZenithMedia) Some of this advertising money is spent placing ads on Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo. Each time we search the web, we see ads that fund

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The small (25,000 pop) South-Central Nebraska city of Hastings, recently captured the title of "America’s Greenest City". Hastings was one of more than 300 communities across the country competing in Yahoo’s "Be A Better Planet", Greenest Cities in America" challenge.

The city received a grand prize of $250,000, and Mayor Matt Rossen told me the community is now planning how to best

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