How green are you? Ecobot knows...
The Wall Street Journal recently opined that "the inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of CO2," causing a greater number of scientists to question the science behind global warming. Whatever your opinion in the matter, it's certainly true that the world would be better off if we wasted less energy, which is what makes open-source Ecobot so useful.
Ecobot tracks your carbon footprint
(Credit: Taxi)While programs like Amee help businesses measure their carbon footprints, Ecobot offers a personal "carbon trainer" for Mac users.
Designed by Taxi, a Canadian corporation, Ecobot is derived from Taxi's participation in the "Green for Green" competition. The program "calculates your carbon footprint by measuring the fuel, power, and paper you use," and, importantly, does a lot of this data aggregation automatically. ("Automatically" is good - heck, if we weren't so lazy, we probably wouldn't need all these vehicles to power us from Point A to Point B.)
Not only does Ecobot keep track of how many pages you print from your laptop, but it also tracks the wireless networks to which you connect and works with you to figure out how you got from one to the other, and calculates the carbon emissions required to make the journey.
Pretty slick.
Even if you're not a tree-hugging, carbon-footprint-obsessed member of the Greenimati, Ecobot is an easy-to-use, unobtrusive way to monitor how much carbon your lifestyle requires. Of course, it only works if you're a Mac user.
Even so, despite Dell's insistence that Apple's Macs aren't as green as Apple claims, Ecobot lets you be as green as you want to be...and brag about it to anyone patient enough to listen to you.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. But please consider the environment before printing out my 3,000-plus tweets.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
This is an awesome European story. This will make my house MUCH greener and the landfill's fill up less... BBC News Story on Standard Mobile Phone chargers. It's about time! http://tinyurl.com/ncfmkq Now we need this for laptops. Heaven.
This is an awesome European story. This will make my house MUCH greener and the landfill's fill up less... BBC News Story on Standard Mobile Phone chargers. It's about time! http://tinyurl.com/ncfmkq Now we need this for laptops. Heaven.
- by carlhage June 30, 2009 10:15 AM PDT
- We don't need a bot to add up some bogus (guessed) numbers-- we need labels on products we buy to understand how much energy they use. We have it for refrigerators, but not for electronics like a TV that might consume more energy than a refrigerator, or computers where a desktop might consume more electricity than the price of a laptop. I measured my $20 cordless phone and found out it will have consumed $80 in electricity! We could save money and reduce carbon if energy consuming products were labeled with the energy cost on store shelves.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(3 Comments)If we taxed pollution and gave the money back to people as a refund, then we include emissions (and energy) from cost of manufacture in the price paid.