Inspirational and good news.
An Indian NGO has started a website directed at kids to educate them about the environment. OneWorld has a great description of the site with some good background too.
Indian NGO Center for Environment Education (CEE) is working to promote awareness and understanding of environmental issues in the country. It has recently introduced a website for children – www.kidsrgreen.org – that allows children to explore and discover environment-related issues.
Former US president, Bill Clinton, has managed to get 5 billion dollars to green some of the world’s largest cities. The money comes in the form of loans and will double the world market for energy saving retrofits within 18 months.
Toronto is one of 16 cities which will be part of the project.
The project, organized by the Clinton Foundation, will involve replacing heating, cooling and lighting systems with energy efficient technology.
It will also involve turning roofs white or reflective to deflect heat from the sun, sealing windows to prevent heat from escaping, replacing windows to allow for more light and setting up sensors that will make lighting and air conditioning more efficient.
Thanks, Arvin!
Wikis are dandy things that have been used to make entire encyclopdeias. Well now you can join a group of people that are trying to create a great online resource of how to be green, it’s called Playgreen.
You can learn how to become more environmentally friendly and you can help others learn what you know by writing your own entries or contributing to others.
Their bottom line:
‘We’ are smarter than ‘me’. The central premise of this assumption is that large groups of people (‘We’) can, and should, make a fantastic resource site to foster responsible consumption habits in our daily life, economy, industries.
Internet users often use search engines, but have you ever wondered which of the two giant search engines is the greenest? Well, there is no clear answer but TechCrunch gives us a basic breakdown on greening the search engines:
Google:
They are also installing 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels at their headquarters in Mountain View. The panels will cover the roofs of the buildings, and Google says it is “the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S.â€Yahoo:
Earlier this year, co-founder David Filo pledged that Yahoo would go carbon neutral, basically by purchasing carbon offsets for their massive electricity usage.
Apparently living in Canada ensures I weigh less because Canada has less gravity (and I thought I was naturally thin). Different parts of the world have endure different levels of gravitational pull, some even witness gravity waves. Neat stuff!
A German-American team has figured out why Canada has less gravity and it has something to do with the Ice Age. The results of the observations can be applied to more than the average weight of a Canadian.
Ultimately, scientists hope to use such data to learn how continents form and evolve over time. “With this information, people could infer better whether the North America plate is actually predominantly stable,” says C K Shum, an expert on the Earth’s gravity at Ohio State University in Columbus, US, who was not a part of this study.
Using this same set of data, researchers have also found that there were two ice domes in the ice sheet on either side of Hudson Bay, given the features in the gravity field that have been left behind. The way the thickness of any ice cover changes at different periods could be used by climate modellers to understand past climate change.