The word unfriend recently garnered the Oxford University Press’ Word of the Year recognition. Adrian Chen of Gawker realized that ‘the Word of the Year is a huge scam.’ He says that the past four winners are ‘all just hacky trend pieces from that year, in lexicographic form.’

To recall, the past four winners for Word of the Year are hypermiling (which is said to be ‘maximizing gas mileage by adjusting your car and driving techniques’), locavore (someone who adheres to the movement that ‘encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food), carbon neutral (‘reducing your carbon footprint,’ then ‘balancing your remaining emissions’), and podcast (‘a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player’).

Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program, defends the recognition, “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.”

As a verb, the word “unfriend” means ‘to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.’ Facebook users will definitely recognize the word “unfriend.” If you’re a Facebook account holder, it’s what you do to your e-stalker that was once your boyfriend or girlfriend before the relationship turned sour, even scary.

Chen says that the Oxford University Press itself ‘admitted that the Word of the Year is nothing more than a silly marketing ploy’ by picking a ‘testament to how much social media is affecting the lexicon.’

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Via Gawker

U2 and Bono have been vocal about their support for Mother Earth in their commitment to ‘save the planet.’ “My prayer is that we become better in looking after our planet,” so says Bono. But people have come to criticize them for their double standard. Bono and his band have a massive carbon footprint as they tour the world with their concerts.

Their U2360 world tour, with a price tab of £90m, shall see the band on the road over a period of 100 days, 18 months. The avowed environmentalists will be consuming 70,000 air miles, all done in their private jet which will generate 64.42 tons of CO2 by flying 22,037 miles to this year’ concert locations alone. In 2009, there will be 44 concerts. There are 40 more projected concerts of the same tour next year, over two continents.

What’s more, the concert tour will lug along three 390-ton stages (‘using 3,286.60 tons of CO2, with another 916.07 tons for extra equipment’) and about ‘200 crew and backstage staff.’ The concert tour’s premiere performance in Barcelona ‘featured the space station-style stage and satellite link-up with the International Space Station.’

Experts have calculated their carbon emissions to tally up to a total of 65,000 tons of CO2. ‘U2’s CO2 emissions are the equivalent of the waste created by 6,500 average British or Irish people in an entire year, or equal to leaving a standard 100 watt light bulb on for 159,000 years.’

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Via Belfast Telegraph

US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is a unique competition that allows talented students and designers to showcase energy efficient solar powered houses. Students from Santa Clara University have designed the Refract House which is all about harnessing light and lightening the carbon footprint we leave behind. The house is built on an area of 800 square feet and is green in every measurable way.

It comes with cutting edge solar thermal and photovoltaic system. The house makes use of natural light so that no energy is wasted on lighting the house. Ambient lighting makes all this easier, and more efficient. There is also a water treatment pool which helps to water the edible plant garden. One could grow vegetables and fruits that are natural and organic.

The house looks quite futuristic yet stays in touch with nature and its beauty. That is perhaps why the design is so cool and awesome. I would love to live in a house like this, but alas, not everyone can be so lucky. If you are lucky enough to stay close to these architects, get one built for yourself and use solar energy!

The hard facts are astounding as the number of people on the planet quadrupled to six billion during the 20th century. The world’s richest people on the planet now number half a billion, and their activities account for half of all carbon dioxide emissions on the entire planet. People from the US, still the richest nation on earth, are responsible for most of these emissions as ‘the carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of four Chinese, 20 Indians, or 250 Ethiopians.’

Needless to say, the carbon or environmental footprint of the rich is huge. The developed world consumes most of the planet’s resources, thus produces most of the greenhouse gas emissions. The few affluent produce most of the pollution on earth.

The old argument of overpopulation as the driver for environmental degradation is old wind. By all evidences presented to us, it is overconsumption and not population growth that is bringing on the destruction of the planet. The conclusion lies in the analysis of ‘ecological footprint’ or the ‘estimated land area required to provide each of us with food, clothing, and other resources, as well as to soak up our pollution.’

On the other end of the scale are the poor. The poorest 50 percent of global population are said to be ‘responsible for just 7 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.’

It is clear to see that overconsumption has been the culprit in the destruction of the planet, contrary to what most international agencies assert that the world is headed towards destruction due to too many people.

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Via environment360

A study by McAfee entitled ‘Carbon Footprint of Spam’ reveals that the annual global energy used up by spam has reached a total of 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). All this power has been needed to transmit, process, and filter spam that has, in turn, reached a generation of 62 trillion spam emails swarming the earth every year.

What’s it really like to translate the plague of junk email? Spam’s aggregate consumed power equals that of all the electricity used in 2.4 million homes. To translate further what that means in carbon footprint, all that power’s CO2 is also commensurate to all the combined emissions of 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

So you think spam is just an irritation, eh? While you were trashing your share of spam, that action added up to the monster’s carbon footprint of more than 17 million tons of CO2.

Sorting out your non-spam and subsequently deleting your spam emails amount to 80 percent of consumed energy. And if you’re an average business user, you are most likely generating 131kg of CO2 every year. 22 percent of the CO2 you generate has to do with spam.

Amidst all this alarmist brouhaha, let us not forget that McAfee, of course, sells technology that filters spam.

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Via BBC/ NETWORKWORLD

Apple Inc is a very wealthy company — it sold 55 million iPods, 13 million iPhones and nearly 10 million Macs last year. Apple also is one of the most admired brands, both generally and among young people. In fact, Apple has done some good things. It has a good record on product power management. More recently it has improved on electronics recycling after being prodded by groups like As You Sow. The dean of climate change himself, Al Gore is one of Apple’s most prominent board members and fans.

So this fact really beats us. Of the big four IT companies — Apple, Dell, HP, IBM — Apple has disclosed the least information and is the only one that has not made a major commitment to carbon footprint reduction. A recent report by RiskMetrics and CERES focusing on corporate governance and climate change policies scored IBM at 79, Dell 77 and Apple 27. Unlike most companies, Apple does not disclose charitable contributions.

Apple’s iTunes store is the top music retailer in the U.S. Imagine the opportunity to use a tiny piece of that valuable real estate to educate consumers by offering free videos on how to reduce carbom foot-print. How about donating or earmarking 5 percent of its profits to mitigate the environmental impact of its products? Apple, you are one of the most popular and closely watched companies. And you have Al Gore on the board. Either you are doing very little or hurting yourself by not responding adequately about what you are doing on the green front. Whatever it is, buck up!

Via : As You Sow Foundation

As you may have known by now, your orange juice traveled a long way before it got into your tall glass. The long attendant process translates to stages of carbon emission. For starters, the orange fruit was grown with the use of greenhouse gases-emitting nitrogen fertilizers. Does not sound too appetizing, does it? The processing of fruit into juice utilized some form of machinery that ran on power and energy which, in turn, must have surely emitted CO2 into the atmosphere. Sounds mechanical, I know. The juice had to be in some form of packaging to get to your grocery store. The raw materials that were sourced and/or recycled for the use of packaging and labeling, once again, shot CO2 up into the skies. Finally, the distribution and delivery process entailed transport that assuredly used fuel that definitely emitted carbon dioxide.

And since you wanted your orange juice to be cold in the morning, your refrigerator uses freon that turns into CFCs that likewise burn a hole in the ozone layer. All the stages of your OJ’s product life mean only one thing: your drink of choice added to the warming up of the near-surface atmosphere of the planet, as well as its oceans.

In the light of the recent pop culture trend to measure carbon footprint, PepsiCo went ahead and summoned Carbon Trust, an independent and recognized carbon footprinter, to measure the global warming contribution of its Tropicana juice drink and thereby suggest ways by which to make the footprint smaller. It was discovered that a two-liter brick-packaged Tropicana juice has the equivalent CO2 emission of 1.7 kg. And since all this information has already robbed you of your appetite for breakfast anyway, we might as well add the uncanny comparison that your shoes have a carbon foortprint of about a hunder kg. of CO2, depending on the style and model.

So, the next time you enjoy that tall glass of cold orange juice with your breakfast, think about it hard. The drink in your hand is really no different from those dirty, sooty, and dismal coal power plants that emit asthma-inducing smog into China’s skies. Then, you might just want to consider eating the real fruit next time, if only because it has lots of fiber that wil be good for your colon.

And you think you can be stringent with your carbon footprint while looking up the meaning of the buzzword over Google, eh? Making at least two searches via the search engine comes up to 14g of CO2 or that which you will use to boil water in an electric kettle. There you go. So, if you’re acutely aware of how much you destroy the environment, more than entire China does, you may need to choose between looking up your horoscope for the day over the Internet and making a cup of instant coffee.

A Harvard professor says that carbon emissions come from both the electricity that your computer runs on as well as the power needed to run Google’s massive data centers. There’s a price to pay for Google’s ability to turn up results quickly. It uses several data banks simultaneously, thus consuming more energy to not make you wait a long time. Your search results report that says ‘Results 1-10 in 25,630,453 for will I be rich, will I be pretty someday (0.02 seconds)’ does lead to the gradual but guaranteed demise of this planet we call home.

Google though isn’t unique in this regard. It was probably singled out because of its reputation for really quickly search results. All data center operators are as guilty as Google in using up more power with producing faster results. This can very well bring us to the conclusion that Internet speed isn’t the most covetable premium of our lives online – not anymore.

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Via THE TIMES OF INDIA

A new study in the journal Energy & Environmental Science says that nearly 700m tons of CO2 would be released into the Earth’s atmosphere by even the smallest nuclear conflict, comparatively measured as more than UK’s annual emission. But there are some benefits of a nuclear war, too. It will also send up 313m tons of soot to block sunlight in the sky to cool the earth after the catastrophe. Though the CO2 will persist, at least the earth cooled down a bit. Do you feel better now?

I bet you wouldn’t even bother nor have the chance to worry about global warming during a nuclear holocaust. You wouldn’t be alive to do that in the first place. The smallest nuclear war can immediately kill 17 million people according to estimates. The scientists have their reasons for conducting the study, though. They want to show that materials on earth have a carbon content that are incendiary in nature, making a nuclear exchange even worse that it already is. But this is just for starters. These scientists aren’t brilliant for nothing.

The whole idea is to show that the benefits of nuclear energy, touted to be the most efficient and environmentally sound energy resource over the long haul, is uninformed propaganda from supporters of nuclear power. The logic is very clear: places that can afford to generate nuclear energy are also the places where nuclear power can potentially exist and proliferate. So, it isn’t much about nuclear as an alternative to carbon but the long-range, overarching adverse effect of choosing to convert to nuclear energy.

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Via guardian.co.uk

The United Kingdom has set a national standard for carbon footprint. This new carbon audit system will measure the attempt of UK business to measure up to the institutionalized CO2 footprint standard, across their specific supply chains – in production, consumption, and disposal.

Everything but everything has a carbon footprint, so this standard applies to all products. That’s a helluva lot of products to measure. This guideline and standard can be used by both the business and public sectors to assess the greenhouse emission levels of their products and services. And since it is a standard, the measurement tools are consistent.

Measuring the carbon footprint of industries is nothing new. So, there must be a little misnomer there to say that this is a newfangled effort that has just been unveiled. The ISO Environmental Management Systems, already many years old, has been doing this for industries across the globe.

What’s new here is the fact that while the ISO14000 Series Environmental Management Systems (ISO 14000, ISO14001, and ISO 14004) that audits environment management standards is optional for companies, the new UK carbon footprint standard has hopes to be mandatory, being state-sponsored that it is.

There is also one fundamental role of a state-promoted standard. It creates wider consciousness among the citizenry. A standard that is uniformly and laterally promoted by the state renders it a quality of legal mandate. Thus, citizens are made aware that the standard is not arbitrary, but rather an imperative.

Eventually, and as a consequence, the people will want to know how much greenhouse gases have been cut by the makers of the products they patronize.

The people become the carbon footprint police, in the process.

So, when the government rubs it in, it also rubs off the consciousness among the people. All in all, a win-win situation.

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Via BBC