Friday 18 April 2008

Eco Cho: Websearching Against Climate Change



Planting some trees to reduce your emissions is not that sufficient. A lot of CO2 reduction programs are more about cooling down your conscious than about cooling down our planet. Okay, mostly it does not hurt to plant trees, but it still hurts that we are meanwhile cutting down rain forests for European "Bio" Diesel. Or flying more because we think we can compensate it anyway.

But what about planting trees while googling around the web? The tree planting search tool Eco Cho just let's you use the search services of Yahoo and Google, but plants a tree per 500 searches. Okay, that's a lot of searches, but if everyone on earth would use a tree planting search engine, that would mean a lot of trees!

Well, you can at least compensate your computer's emissions with it ;)

via: Lohas.de

See also my earlier article Virtual Activism on online tree planting

2 comments:

Crafty Green Poet said...

Interesting blog!

I like this idea of offsetting computer searches like this. It gives me a dilemma though as my current search engine of choice (everyclick) raises money for charity with every search....

Liz said...

The idea of planting trees to reduce, or offset, your carbon emissions for the energy you use is an excellent idea. If a person is using a computer anyway, it is great for Google and Yahoo to implement such a program to offset this use. Another program people may not be aware of just yet is through Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car. When you rent a car through either of these companies, you can choose to purchase a carbon offset for $1.25 and are guaranteed that your purchase will support a high-quality, independently verified, greenhouse gas reduction effort aimed at balancing out the environmental impact of an average rental car through their companies. Further, the carbon offset through this program is based on the mileage much greater than a typical person probably drives a rental car. Another great benefit is that Enterprise will also match any customer donations dollar for dollar, up to $1 million. So next time anyone needs to rent a car, remember to take advantage of this carbon offset program!