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If you're in need of inspiration to stick to your green goals or are looking for new ways to cut carbon, here’s a new website to check out at work…sorry, in your spare time at home. Carbonrally is a new website that aims to mix online games and social networks with consumers’ desire to shrink their carbon footprint.
Here's how it works. The company behind Carbonrally, Carbon Challenge, regularly posts a ‘challenge’ that translates into a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Avoiding plastic bottles by choosing filtered tap water over bottled water, for example, translates into reducing 1.36kg of carbon dioxide emissions a week.
Individuals or teams can take up the challenge. Typically, it's the "dark green" consumers who take on the challenges, says founder Jason Karas, a Boston entrepreneur who studied environmental management but took a detour into internet management for 10 years. But ganging up to take on other teams (in a friendly competition kind of way of course) is what gets people really fired up.
A group of 17 "tweenage girls" from New Jersey just passed Google's Pittsburgh office in carbon reductions who in turn are fighting it out with Google's Cambridge crew. "We're taking Cambridge down!" the Pittsburg Googlers say. No sign of any UK members or groups yet, so get online and show them what us Brits are made of.
There are already several carbon calculators out there available from carbon offset companies and other sources, such as Act on CO2. Carbon Rally wants to keep it quick and light, while tapping into people's tribal competitive spirit. "We don't have to get people worked up and bummed out about climate change," Karas said. "We've giving them a place where they have an opportunity to act on that emotion."
The company expects to make revenue by having its challenges sponsored by corporations that offer environmentally oriented products or are looking to green up their image. Another planned feature is to have 'carbon rallyers' themselves offer challenges to others.
26 November 2007 04:31pm
The build up of Carbon Dioxide is humankind's greatest threat to its survival, but Carbon Capture is putting off today what others will have to solve tomorrow.
The World Innovation Foundation is the voice of the world's 'INDEPENDENT' scientific community (3,500 eminent scientists, engineers and technologists and counting). It is not dictated too by governments or national academies of science. This independence of mind away from the control of governments and multi-national financially supported entities, gives the WIF the ability to tell the truth.
Therefore with regard to just one possible aspect of trying to reduce the effects of global warming, that of carbon capture, what we are doing here is basically putting off as usual, problems that our future generations will have to solve. Therefore carbon capture is just putting off the inevitable and where the big multinationals will make literally billions out of a regime of continuation and where no real solutions are found. Indeed, if this vast amount of carbon leaches out of the ground or oceans in the future, we might as well say goodbye to human life on this planet. Therefore politicians are presently dabbling with humankind's very existence.
What in essence should be happening is that governments around the world should be investing in the development of a centralised global centre that solves the world's immense problems, not putting them off for others to solve at a later date. We as independent scientific minds have been telling governments for a decade now to develop the concept of the ORE-STEM complex with its 1000 plus incubator centres around the world. Simply, this mechanism harnesses the world's creative thinking and siphons it into this huge centre to solve the biggest problems that confronts humankind and possibly save it from extinction. It is common sense in reality, as only a mechanism large enough to stop the worst effects of global warming and provide the necessary answers to famine, supporting the population explosion (now predicted to be a minimum of 10 billion by 2050 and possibly even 12 billion) and alternative energy sources (new discoveries) et al. Therefore the world has to force forward what the independent scientific community is saying, for if not, we certainly run the greatest risk of all, the extinction of the human experience itself.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
Bern, Switzerland
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