A Thursday Afternoon Links Roundup

Lynne Kiesling

I should probably follow David Zetland’s lead and start calling these speed blogging, because it’s really just me clearing out my links to open and interesting reads!

This is an old Environmental Leader article from November, but it describes Sun’s Open Eco application:

Sun Microsystems has updated OpenEco.org, an online community that provides tools to help companies calculate, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

What’s cool is that it’s a community, complete with discussion forums, developers, and so on. It enables organizations to benchmark their carbon emissions against industry peers. Regardless of one’s stance on carbon policy, software tools that make information gathering cheaper and make information more transparent are good things.

Similarly, this Environmental Leader article discusses another information tool, this time from the Rocky Mountain Institute, that estimates “electricity productivity” by state. By electricity productivity they mean state domestic product (SDP) per kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed. New York gets the most bang for its buck from its electricity consumption, not very surprising, given its population density. 48, 49, 50: Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi, respectively. I leave it to you to develop a hypothesis for that!

From the Oil Drum, here’s a lengthy guest post from Joost van den Bulk with an estimated economic benefit-cost analysis of electric cars relative to internal combustion cars in the Netherlands. I have not digested it fully, but it’s based on his Master’s thesis, and quite informative.