This post is part of Blog Action Day which I signed up to recently. More details at the Blog Action Day blog announcement.

While many people continue to completely ignore the evidence that climate change is real, and continue to think that humans have nothing to do it with it, a lot of other people are working hard to fix it and minimize the damage us humans are doing to the environment. A survey of all the good work being done is impossible - there is simply a lot of activity. So in this post, I would like to pick out a few high profile and a few virtually unknown examples of what people are doing to fix and mitigate environmental damage.

The examples I’ve chosen are meant to be diverse, each attacking the problem in a different angle or fixing one small piece at a time. The idea here is to demonstrate to everyone just how amenable the problem is. There simply is no excuse not to minimize our damage. And by "our", I mean you and me, I mean companies, I mean governments and countries. And, perhaps surprsingly, a lot of these examples actually save a lot of money!

So in no particular order…

• I want to start with Climate Care, an Oxford, UK based organization. Climate Care sells carbon offsets. Briefly, every human activity, from travel, to heating houses, to cooking, even food, requires energy, which in turn means everything we do generates carbon dioxide emissions; the emissions are called the carbon footprint of the activity. Some activities have a much larger carbon footprint than others and so it would be useful to be able to calculate the footprint accurately, reduce it as much as possible, and compensate for whatever footprint is left.

  Calculating carbon footprints is a bit of an art and a bit of a science but there are ways to roughly gauge the footprint. The Climate Care website has several carbon footprint calculators that tell you what’s the footprint of your activities. What Climate Care does is much more though: the website has guidance on how to lower you carbon footprint and also helps you compensate for whatever carbon impact you have that you cannot change. The compensation is called carbon offsetting and simply put, you pay Climate Care to fund projects that avoid, reduce, or absorb greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Projects range from simply planting more trees that absorb carbon dioxide to using alternative fuels that have a lower carbon footprint.

  So how much does this cost? I recently did a return trip from London Heathrow to Boston, so I plugged this into the Climate Care flights calculator and it told me that the resulting emissions are 1.45 tonnes of CO₂ and the cost to offset this will be £10.85. How much is that as a percentage of the ticket price? 3%. That’s it.

• Next up is an organization called Less Watts back by Intel Corp. Less Watts is a forum where Linux developers, end users, and IT managers talk and develop solutions to make Linux more power-friendly. What could an operating system do for the environment? A lot actually.

  Think about a laptop you’re using to type up a letter or a blog post. You really only need the screen, the keyboard, some processing power to run the software, and occasionally, internet access. What about all the other hardware? A clever operating system sends unused hardware to sleep, waking it up only when it’s needed. Also, as the processor is idle, the operating system can wait in many ways, and some use more power than others. I mentioned laptops as they’re easy to measure in terms of battery life: a clever system can maximize battery life by consuming less power. Scaled to all computer users world-wide, the power savings, and thus carbon footprint of computing, can be greatly reduced!

• Next up are companies like Google and Microsoft. Granted Google has some very questionable practices, it, Microsoft, and many others are installing solar panels to power their campuses. At the time of writing, Google’s solar initiative has generated over 500000 kW-hours while at the time of building Microsofts’s was claimed to be the largest in Silicon Valley.

  Why is this important? Internet data centers consume large amounts of electricity, and the more we depend on internet-based services, the more of a demand there’ll be. It’s good to see companies noting this fact and trying to work with it.

• There is a startup company working on energy generation from vibrations called Perpetuum. Basically, these tiny generators convert vibrations into a little trickle of electricity. These so-called microgenerators can power measurement devices placed in very hard to reach places, like in monitoring machines in a factory or at the top of buildings, and allow these measurements to be relayed using a wireless connection. Very cool and frankly, this is the kind of creative thinking we need to tackle global warming.

• Finally, I want to talk about Virgin Galactic, especially their proposed Spaceport America design. The architecture of the spaceport is an amazing marriage of design and function that works with its environment. Two things are worth noting here: the spaceport looks like it is part of the surrounding desert, so it’s not like the eye-sores that we call airports today. Secondly, notice how the spaceport is heated and cooled (slide 4 in the second link) using the surrounding air. This mechanism will ensure that the energy spent to control the temperature of the spaceport will be minimal. This is called ’sustainable design’ and it’s a movement that’s gaining a lot of traction these days. Watch this space (sorry for the pun ).

So as you can see, tackling global warming and minimizing the human impact on the environment is doable. It doesn’t require some magic potion or divine intervention. It is simply a matter of everyone thinking more about how their actions affect the environment and how to minimize those effects. Easier said than done, yes, but it can be done.

[tags]Blog Action Day[/tags]