Posted 08/28/09 at 09:55:49 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The British Met Office is in possession of the country’s most powerful supercomputer, which it uses to better predict the possible impact of climate change on Britain. The weather supercomputer, installed in its headquarters, is now being lambasted for having such an embarrassingly large carbon footprint that the facility holding it has been labeled the worst public building in the UK in terms of pollution.

According to the Department of Communities and Local Government, which compiled the list, the Met Office’s HQ owes 75% of its carbon footprint to the mean machine, capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second. The supercomputer hogs 1.2 megawatts of energy. 'We would be throwing ourselves back into the dark ages of weather forecasting if we withdrew our reliance on supercomputing, it's as simple as that,' a spokesman for the Met Office said, justifying the use of the £30million ($48 million) supercomputer.

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Posted 08/07/09 at 02:00:36 PM by Paul Lilly

Sprint on Thursday announced the Samsung Reclaim, the first phone in the U.S. constructed from eco-friendly bio-plastic materials. In addition to being constructed from 80 percent recyclable materials, Sprint said it will donate $2 to The Nature Conservancy's Adopt an Acre program each time a customer purchases a Reclaim.

"This generous donation from Sprint will help us protect and restore some of America's most beautiful and ecologically-important landscapes for future generations to enjoy," said Mark Tercek, president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy. "We applaud Sprint's sustainability efforts, as innovation and new technology are crucial to the future of conservation."

Features of the Reclaim include a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard, Sprint Navigation with GPS support, 2MP camera with 3x digital zoom and camcorder, expandable memory up to 32GB, and an integrated web browser.

The Reclaim will be made available in choice of Earth Green or Ocean Blue starting August 16 for $50 (after $30 instant rebate and $50 MIR) with a two-year service agreement.

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Posted 05/18/09 at 04:36:08 PM by Andy Salisbury

Google recognizes that there’s been a lot of talk about the energy needed to power the Internet, and they’ve decided to publicly throw in their two cents by boldly stating that the carbon emissions required to get a glass of orange juice is equivalent to 1,050 Google searches.

“Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide,” wrote Urs Hölze, Google’s Senior Vice President of Operations. “We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.”

The blog post also noted that to do one load of dishes in an EnergyStar compliant dishwasher was equivalent to 5,100 searches, a give mile trip in the average U.S. automobile was 10,000 searches, a cheeseburger would run you 15,000 searches and just one month’s worth of electricity used by the average U.S. household clocks in with 3,100,000 searches. Sure makes you think, doesn’t it?

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Posted 04/27/09 at 11:30:17 AM by David Murphy

Green. It's all the rage in the technology world nowadays. You've got green hard drives. Green laptops. Green desktops. Green printers (with soy ink!). Green displays. Green power strips. Louis Armstrong saw skies of blue and clouds of white, but any geek worth his electric bill sees nothing but green. It's the color of the environment, and it's the color of all the cash you'll be saving by using green-themed applications to curtail your out-of-control PC habits. Or normal PC habits, because anyone can benefit from the open-source and freeware applications we're profiling in this week's software roundup. Best of all, most of these applications automatically take care of your green actions for you--set them up to run, and you won't have to lift a finger to tap into increased savings and Captain Planet-style goodwill.

The power is yours... after the jump!

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Posted 11/03/08 at 03:13:37 PM by Andy Salisbury

AMD’s logo isn’t the only green thing around their offices. For the eighth year in a row the chip maker has announced an Annual Global Climate Protection Plan to keep with their current trends of cutting down on their greenhouse gas emissions, and improving their manufacturing process.

AMD’s been keeping good on their promises too. They’ve been able to exceed their commitments from 2002-2007 by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent and their normalized energy consumption by 30 percent. Not bad!

They’re even looking to report on their “Scope 3” gas emissions. Scope 3 emissions are any and all emissions that are associated with supply chain, product distribution and employee business travel. How they’re planning to do so isn’t detailed, but so far they’ve done a top-notch job, so there’s little doubt that they’ll have any issues with this.

According to Dirk Meyer, president and chief executive officer of AMD, “By continuing to expand and share AMD’s climate change strategy and performance metrics with the general public, governments, suppliers, industry groups, and the scientific community, AMD is enabling others to benefit from our experiences as we learn from theirs. Transparency and collaborative innovation are hallmarks of AMD’s approach to global climate protection, and represent a fusion of our efforts married to the industry’s best practices, such as supply chain accountability.”

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Posted 08/12/08 at 08:51:29 AM by Paul Lilly

Last September, Dell became the first major computer maker to announce plans to go carbon neutral, saying it would do so by the end of 2008. That gives the OEM five more months to reach its self imposed deadline, but now the company is saying it has already achieved its goal.

"We're driving 'green' into every aspect of our global business," said CEO Michael Dell in a statement. "This includes setting new standards for energy efficiency and green power, delivering environmental and cost savings for customers, and aligning key growth priorities with our focus on preserving our shared Earth."

In the quest to become carbon neutral, Dell has been working with Conservation International to protect nearly 600,000 acres of tropical forestland in Madagascar that might otherwise have been destroyed, allowing the OEM to claim a half-million ton of carbon emissions savings over the next five years. Another big boost came from reducing indirect emissions from facilities energy use. Dell has upgraded light fixtures at its Texas campus, updated heating and cooling systems around the world, and installed occupancy sensors for light. By doing these things, Dell says it was able to reduce its annual carbon dioxide footprint by 20,000 tons.

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Posted 07/05/08 at 12:21:55 PM by Paul Lilly

Absolutely no flatulence jokes will be blasted out in this blog, and while I'll do my best to hold it in, scientists are letting out concerns that a gas used in the making of LCD and plasma screens could be hurting the environment. The news couldn't have come at a worse time; plasmas and LCDs account for almost half of all televisions produced this year, and that trend doesn't appear to be slowing down. Almost all of them benefited from nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) during the production process, a potentially harmful gas also used to produce semiconductors and synthetic diamonds.

Exactly how dangerous NF3 might be to the environment remains a mystery, and will likely become a point of contention. Skeptics will point out that NF3 isn't one of the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol international climate change agreement, a legaly binding treaty designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but NF3 was only produced in tiny amounts when the treaty was signed over 10 years ago and production has since skyrocketed. Today scientists estimate the gas to be 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide and warn it could cause more global warming than coal-fired power plants.

Find out why the United States should be particularly concerned after the jump.

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