We Green Westport

From The New York Times:

YOU know your shoe size. But you probably don’t know your carbon footprint, particularly the footprint of your home.

“The term ‘carbon footprint’ is used to describe the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere each year by a person, household, building, organization or company,” said Cathy Milbourn, a spokeswoman for the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

One of the main sources of greenhouse gases is the home. “For individuals, about 40 percent of our carbon emissions come from our homes,” said Eric Carlson, the executive director of Carbonfund.org, an environmental group in Silver Spring, Md.

Activities outside the home, like driving or flying, are part of the problem, too. But what happens in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom and yard is important, from heating to cooking to using products whose manufacture produces emissions that can be harmful.

According to the E.P.A., the average carbon footprint for a two-person household in the United States is 41,500 pounds a year. That’s far from the ideal: Mr. Carlson said he hopes that all households, no matter the number of people living there, reduce their levels by as much as 50 to 80 percent in the next 40 years.

How to reduce? We have many ideas posted on our Pledge Card and in this blog. There are also so many other sites that list ways to reduce your footprint. It all comes down to doing something a little different. Breaking old habits and instituting some “green” habits.

Breaking old habits is not easy, but experts say the rewards are worth it, not only for the environment but also for the pocketbook. Those who reduce their carbon footprint by decreasing their energy use, they say, usually reduce their energy costs as well.

An Energy Diet for Power-Hungry Household PCs

From the New York Times:

For more than a decade, the federal Energy Star program has developed voluntary power-management standards for PCs, and suppliers like Intel and Microsoft have steadily improved the energy efficiency of their chips and software. But Mr. Fanara estimated that less than half of PCs met those standards, in part because more energy-efficient hardware adds slightly to production costs.

“There are large potential savings beyond what Energy Star can do,” he said.

The free software, called Edison, is a consumer version of the PC energy-saving software sold to corporate customers by Verdiem, which is financed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading venture capital firm and an aggressive investor in green technologies, and other venture investors.

From Yahoo News:

The Edison software doesn’t completely shut a computer off but rather moves it to a “suspend” state, which uses less energy. Users can also schedule to shut down the screen and hard drive before going into suspend mode.

The tool lets users have work and home settings. It has a read-out of how much electricity you are saving, also translated into reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and dollar savings.

Estimates will vary widely, depending on electricity rates and type of computer, but Verdiem says the average savings is 410 kilowatt hours a year, or $36.50.

The catch?

The sign-up process promotes Verdiem’s power management software for businesses, called Surveyor, which the company says can pay for itself within a few years.

The license for Edison is for one person. It runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Worth a look and try.