Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection has been running some new stunning ads on TV.  They are stunning to me because it shows that we may finally be reaching the point where we're no longer fighting over the reality and actually moving to a place where we will take some serious action.  All of the major Presidential candidates affirm the reality of climate change and now the decisions are essentially basically over what the best ways to move to a post-carbon society are.

Anyway, check the videos and check their website.  We *CAN* solve it, but we gotta get started now.

http://wecansolveit.org/

So here's a cool idea I came across in GOOD: There's a website called CarbonRally.com where you read about ways to help the environment by cutting CO2 emissions.  Well, that's not such a big deal, since there are about 5 billion websites out there dedicated to helping people help the world.  But Carbon Rally has a cool hook:

It was early in 2007 when we put our heads together and began discussing how we could have an impact on climate change. More than anything, we wanted to combine our knowledge of consumers, software, and environmental studies to find a new approach to the problem. We talked about our personal attempts to reduce global warming, and we quickly realized that we shared a common frustration. The issue seemed just too big for any single person to make a meaningful difference.

We understood the basic links between energy use, CO2 emissions, and climate change. We also knew that we were comfortable in our habits of consumption, and that big changes weren’t going to happen overnight. We needed to identify some realistic steps to rein-in our behavior and make a plan to accomplish them. Still, it would be hard to get excited about our plan without some sort of feedback loop that showed real progress.

And what fun is that?

That’s when we hatched the idea of Carbonrally. We would create a place where many people could discover and commit to small, positive actions over time. People on the site could propose great ideas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and the community would choose the best ideas to pursue as a team. We’d track the collective impacts, and show the power of many people getting the job done together. Bit by bit, the community would learn the connections between climate and lifestyle, and rack-up literally tons of carbon benefits along the way. The Internet would make the process surprisingly fun and social… we’d celebrate and we’d compete!

Let's face it, we all want to do what we can to help the planet, but there's nothing like a competition to make something like this fun.  I mean, what's the point of saving the planet if you can't rub it in someone's face?  Or something like that.

Seriously though, it's a pretty good way of making that one lightbulb you change or that one paper cup you save part of something bigger.  And when you can see how your little actions add up, it starts to seem like a doable thing.

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As much as I like talking about me, sometimes I like to talk about others as well.  This week I wanted to talk about a local crafter/maker who runs My Imaginary Boyfriend.  Her work has been in a number of magazines like Adorn and Bust and featured on boingboing and a whole host of other online sites.   The proprietress (and dear friend of mine) Erika has been in the crafting business for a few years now professionally, but my own shelves are adorned with her cool stuff going back 10-15 years.  She's been showing at craft fairs across the country from New York to San Francisco and will be at the Maker Faire in San Mateo on May 3rd and 4th.  I wrote a piece on my trip to the Maker Faire last year and I'm looking forward to seeing her set up there.

Her work is pretty wide ranging, but most of it is either a bit geeky, a little kitsch, or just pure awesome style.  She has a felt pillow that looks like a log and small felt robots.  She's also made some really cool geek gear like a tie that is quite reminiscent of Doctor Who's tie (the 10th doctor).  What would you expect from someone who made a tiny felt TARDIS to hold her cell phone?  On top of that, the other half of her items would look quite at home in a high end shop or in a quite stylish home.

It's always fun to spend time with people who love making stuff but love making stuff so different from the stuff I can make.  Anyway, if you like the pictures, head on over to her website and check out her blog and show her some love.  You could also head to her store and show her some love too.  :)

[edit: Looking through the photos I chose, I pulled a lot of wood grain.  This isn't a representative sample, just stuff that jumps out at me.  You should definitely click here.  Heh. ]

So maybe I have been spending too much time just cribbing from EcoGeek, but boy do they do a good job.  Today's article on Chicago's Merchandise Mart (a 4 million sq. ft. building with its own zip code) is pretty eye opening.  Aside from Ecogeek's recent realization that buildings use more energy than pretty much all the transportation used in the US is not big news to people in the trades, but as this seeps into the national consciousness, hopefully we'll see more upgrades occur.

The Merch Mart in Chicago did a number of things to achieve their goal of going green.  From EcoGeek: http://www.ecogeek.org/cont...

• Most of the 4,000 windows were replaced.
• Water waste was tracked, to determine which of the 2,000 toilets needed to be replaced with more efficient ones
• Leaks in the air conditioning were tracked down and fixed, saving over $4,000 a year.
• Many of the buildings spaces were metered individually, to determine high energy use areas, and bill tenants accordingly.
• A supply shop for tenants was opened in the basement, making everything from low-vapor paints to high-efficiency bulbs available, inexpensively, to all tenants.
• Lighter carpets make rooms brighter, meaning less electricity is needed
• A Bulb-Eater in the basement eats fluorescent bulbs, contains their toxins, and produces waste bins that are recycled properly.

I like the light carpets and the supply shop.  These are both easy and durable changes that can be implemented quickly across the country.

As always, this is your green, building, and green building open thread.

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Actually, a bit more.  At Shell's yearly Eco-Marathon, the winner this year was a French team from St. Joseph La Joliverie, who went 7,148 miles on a single gallon of fuel.  It makes 4 dollar per gallon gas seem like a real bargain.

Of course, these cars will not be coming to a showroom near you anytime soon, but the ideas are out there.  One of the issues I'm sure is that construction costs probably make the price of a Tesla look like a Fit.  Another is that the vehicles are so light and fragile that any collision would likely turn any occupants into what was colorfully termed "street pizza" on another blog.

Everything I'm reading is saying that super-efficiency is great and that ethanol is great, but it's time to make the big switch from combustion to electric.  Lighter engines with less heat mean better miles per energy unit and tighter body construction which helps with aerodynamics.  Still, 7148 mpg?  Sweet.

BTW, I'll be trying to post more home repair stuff in the next few weeks.  If you've got a home repair issue or just want to talk about home stuff, this is the place.

OK, so you can't buy any of these cars new today and the safety regulations pretty much have eliminated them from ever being mass produced again, but I love these little microcars.  The video is from a show called Top Gear, an English show for fans of car buffs, fans of things getting blown up or crashed, and for general English silliness.  If you like cars, this show should be on your "must watch" list.  In the video, Jeremy Clarkson, the 6'5" host of the show, drives around town (and around office buildings) in the Peel P50, the smallest car ever to go into production.  Advertised as "almost cheaper than walking" it got 100 miles to the gallon.  Of course, it got that 100 mpg at 30-35 mph max.

The video got me thinking about cars though.  There's a Fiat 500 Giardinieria for sale down the street from me which could actually be converted to electric.  I went online to find more treasures of this kind and came across the holy grail of microcars:  The Microcar Museum in Georgia.  This is really a tresure trove of microcars and has piles and piles (well, not literally "piles") of cars that make the Giardiniera look like a bloated Humvee.  Sure, some of them run on moped motor.  Some are even pedal cars, which I think is cheating.  But these little suckers are cute and look fun to drive.

So I was browsing around my normal haunts for a green energy story to write up and came across this short excerpt about starting your own country over at WorldChanging:

Step 1: Make sure you are eligible

As tempting as it might be to declare your cubicle a sovereign state, customary international law actually does specify minimum standards for statehood.

1. You must have a defined territory.

2. You must have a permanent population.

3. You must have a government.

4. Your government must be capable of interacting with other states.

Hmmm, seems interesting.  Turns out the real guide is at ForeignPolicy.com

Step 2 continues:

Congratulations on joining the ranks of Transnistria, Somaliland, and a host of other countries that won’t be marching at the Olympics anytime soon. Just because you’ve met the qualifications and declared yourself independent doesn’t mean that you’re going to be taken seriously. Even the Principality of Sealand—located on a 10,000-square-foot platform in the North Sea—has tried with mixed success to claim sovereignty under these qualifications.

There are a few more steps after the link, including how to get recognized internationally, but let's not put the cart before the horse.  The most important thing to do before we decide to take over the Californian building and declare ourselves an independent state, we should find out if they have showers.  After that, we'll declare statehood and settle on a name.  I do think we can rule out anything with ".com" at the end since there will be an impulse to call our citizens "dot commies".

Anyone want to continue with this?  If you were starting your own country, what would it called and what would the big rules be?

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You want it, you got it.  I'm going to be working with some folks at the paper to implement some features for the photo blog.  In the meantime, let's kick this thing off right away.  I've included a pic of mine here that still needs a bit of photoshopping but I like the lines and the light.

So, couple of orders of business:  First, I'm thinking we'll just dedicate this thread to posting whatever pictures people want, but we'll also find a way to put up a weekly challenge to get people out and about.

Second, I'll get us a dedicated name for the blog by next week and I'll cook up a banner as well.  The hope is that as time goes on, we'll add a bunch of user photos to the blog banner.

Anything else you'd like to see here?

OK Folks, it's Monday morning and you've survived another weekend.  After last week, I figured I'd give a go to taking over the ill-fated New Users Click Here series and try to breathe a bit of life back into it.  As an added bonus, we'll also turn this into an open thread for everyone, meaning that you can pretty much talk about anything you want.  Have a story that you've been meaning to blog?  Post it here.  Have a problem with the blog?  That can go here as well.

As for me, I'm trying to figure out how to embed YouTube Videos in comments. I've seen it done but when I use the "embed" tag I end up displaying all the code, plus a few bits where the software picks URLs out.  So, if anyone can show me how that gets done or lemme know if it's unsupported, that would be great.

Happy Monday!

So I know this is Jason's title, but I'm going to borrow it for today.  We've had a number of people, myself included, who are having some browser issues and so I thought we could all share our tips and tricks for getting the site up and running on our respective setups.  For myself, I use Firefox mostly with my Toshiba laptop running XP.  Runs really well and fast.  I've tried to access the site using my HTC Mogul running WinMo 6 and IE and Minimo kinda make the site unreadable.  Opera Mobile renders well and fast, but doesn't allow me to post.

So, what browser issues are you having?