Looking to green up your life in just 7 easy steps?  The folks over at Dothegreenthing.com want to help you lessen your impact on the planet and let you show off creative skills at the same time.   The year-old British based non-profit has already inspired people from 171 countries to submit ridiculously cool videos and stories about what they have done to reduce their carbon-footprint.   While I’m a little freaked out by their mascot, “The Green Thing”:

I am loving the user generated videos, like this one

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The Chicago Tribune went out into the Chicagoland area (which is what they call, you know, the area around Chicago) to find the Chicagoan with the lowest carbon footprint, and they came up with Ken Dunn, a 65-year old who is so green his carbon footprint is only about ten percent that of your average American.

Let’s go down the list of what makes Dunn such a lean green fighting machine, minus the fighting.   And the machine.   But the article litearlly does call him “very lean” and “green.”  So anyway.

He rides a bike instead of driving.   He air-dries all his clothes.   He grows his own vegetables.   He heats his home with a wood-burning furnace.   He eats expired and discarded food he gets from his job as a recycler.

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willyoujoinus.com is a website that urges you to save gas and conserve energy coming from a place you might not expect it - Chevron.

The site, which has a counter showing you how many barrels of gas have been consumed around the globe since you arrived at the site (I’m over 770,000 already), has an interactive energy generator calculator that shows you how to “do more with less.”  And, starting tomorrow, there will be an MPG Optimizer to learn how to “drive smarter” to save gas.

Perhaps most interesting is the Energyville game, which is SimCity-styled and puts you in charge of the energy resources of an entire city.   You get to decide how your city reaches full power, and the risks and rewards that go along with it.

Of course, Chevron isn’t only telling you how you can stop buying their gas - they’re telling you what the company is doing to become more efficient, how they’re embracing solar power, and so forth.   They’ve also compiled a section of important energy issues, so you can better educate yourself about the problems facing us going forward, and some viable solutions.

So, shiny graphics and fun games aside, what do we think?

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Have you been trying to figure out the easiest and smartest way that you can reduce your carbon output on an everyday basis? And do you like to get that information in a fun flash-based internet environment? And do you like being able to easily save your choices online so you can calculate your carbon savings and share them with friends? And do you like rhetorical questions?

Well, if you answered “Yes” to any of those, except the last one, then the BBC’s Bloom is for you. The website is filled with information and tips on how to plant “seeds,” which are actions you can take that help the environment. Says the site,

Bloom helps by hand-picking individual actions for you, then letting you compare them by how much CO2 they save, how cheap they are or how easy other Bloomers have found them.

Still with me? Good.

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Statue of Liberty. Photo by satosphere. (Creative Commons)

Summer in New York City means tourists. Many people, from all over the world, make NYC their summer vacation destination. And why wouldn’t they, we have amazing museums, attractions, parks and of course shopping.

However, those of us that live in the big apple rarely get the time to appreciate those things. We’re always on the move, running from work to the gym to a restaurant and maybe to a play, movie or party. More and more folks are beginning to change that though in an effort to save money and gas by taking a “staycation” right here.

Staycations can range from visiting the sites you’ve never seen (like the Statue of Liberty) or staying at home and watching TV during the day. Either way you’re doing something different than your regular routine and you’re also saving money and gas - both things that folks are having trouble with these days.

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Japan is launching an ambitiously green scheme to get companies to start putting carbon footprint labels on their products in an effort to inspire producers and consumers to lower their CO2 emissions. The labels will appear on a variety of products including food packaging, electrical appliances, and even detergent.

Right now the program is voluntary, but many companies are happily volunteering to use carbon labeling to gain an edge in the ever-growing green consumer market. The Japanese Trade Ministry is currently working out the kinks for the government-approved calculation and labeling system, but it should end up looking similar to this ——>

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New eco-friendly dress guidelines at the U.N. will probably skew slightly more conservative than the one pictured above.

The United Nations is urging its staffers to wear cooler clothes during the summer to cut air conditioning bills and lessen the building’s carbon footprint:

“I don’t want to get involved in the fashion police of determining exactly what people can wear,” the building’s renovating architect told the Associated Press, “but the encouragement of business casual is where we are going.”

I know that, throughout the ages, there has been one question that has plagued us, and given us a mind puzzle, an awesome mind puzzle, that we may never unravel: did the characters in Star Wars live an environmentally sustainable lifestyle?  This day in age, I’m not sure there’s a more important question we can ask.

Thankfully, the guys at EarthFirst.com have analyzed the trilogy (anyone that leaves a comment that says “What about Episodes 1-3?” should just go away. Those aren’t real movies.) and come up with the perhaps definitive guide to the eco-cred of Star Wars, movie by movie.   They label the Jawas as recyclers in the original, point out the natural insulation of the Echo base on the ice planet Hoth in Empire, and as for Jedi?  They point out Jabba’s eco-friendly style of execution.

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JetBlue Airways has stopped handing out free disposable headphones on its flights. The airline is encouraging customers to bring their own headphones in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint by cutting back on waste. But never fear, having just flown JetBlue yesterday - the last day for free headphones - I can assure you that the better legroom, the free DirecTV and XM Satellite Radio, and the higher quality free snacks and drinks are still in full effect.

JetBlue Airlines is trying to reduce their carbon footprint onboard their planes through a combination of cutting back on waste through eliminating headphones and in flight magazines.

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Sir Paul McCartney is said to be “horrified” that his spanking new hybrid car was flown 7,000 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom. The aging British rocker received the car, the $170,000 Lexus LS600H hybrid, as a gift for promotional work he had done for Lexus, but was mystified when the automobile was loaded onto a Korean Air flight and flown to Britain rather than arriving via ship as originally planned.

Transporting the car via jet created a carbon footprint nearly 100 times bigger than if the car had been sent by sea. Carbon offsetting firm CO2Balance.com estimated thatsending the enormous car on the plane created a carbon footprint of 38,050 kg as opposed to a 397 kg footprint for the three week boat journey.

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