The Delft University of Technology is currently testing out a computer mouse that is powered by solar. It’s basically a mouse with a transparent top where the sun light can shine through.

They are testing the “willingness of the user to adapt his behaviour to favourable light conditions by regularly charging the unit with daylight from the window, and the computer usage pattern. With solar energy, under ideal circumstances charging can occur a factor of five times quicker than in the current situation. Over time it is estimated that several hundred million batteries could be saved annually on a global scale.”

It’s a cool idea. But I think this mouse is more for the casual computer user. They need to come up with some sort of chargestation for the mouse so that people can use the mouse even when it’s dark outside.

- Minister Cramer tests first solar-powered mouse

How can you support companies that tries to do little or a lot to help solve the climate crisis? Which companies have a plan to reduce their CO2 emissions? That’s two hard questions. But thankfully ClimateCounts.org has rated over 55 companies that are being used by households in the USA and the UK. These are well known brands across eight consumer sectors, ranging from electronics to apparel.

You can use the Climate Counts Company Scorecard to see how serious companies are about stopping climate change - and how they compare to their sector competitors. The annually updated scorecard reflects the self-reported efforts of companies to address climate change - or avoid it altogether.

Did you know that Amazon hasn’t scored any points yet? That the big company giant Microsoft has a green score of 31 compared to innovative Apple that only has a 2 point score. But Microsoft on the other hand get beaten by Yahoo! Who scores a total of 36 points.

The list goes on and you can find all the scores over at ClimateCounts.org/scorecard.php.

Some of you might have saw that our blog and forum was down parts of Sunday and all day on Monday. The reason to this was that we moved Green Blog over to a new server that our current host had just got. The actual move went fast and without any errors. But it took some time for the DNS to change, around 24 hours. I am personally sorry for not letting everyone know this in advanced. But it all went so fast. We weren’t supposed to move until after the 9th of August.

Oh, and if you haven’t already. Please come by our forum and join in on the fun. We discuss everything from the effects of global warming, cigarettes, SEO, how you can live more green, the TV show 24 and of course green web hosts.

My name is Michelle Dyer and I am here to announce my contributions to Green Blog. Please allow me to send out a huge thank you to the moderator for inviting me to participate as a writer for this great site. I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts, as well as any research I plan to carry out, on the topic of Climate Change. Please feel free to send in your thoughts, suggestions, questions and concerns. Together, we will tackle this growing monster from the deep!

The huge, award-winning, green blog TreeHugger was recently acquired by Discovery Communications.

Close to four years ago, TreeHugger was founded with the goal of helping to push sustainability into the mainstream. Today, as an award-winning Top 20 blog having served over 50 million pages, we like to believe that we’ve played a part in pushing green towards its tipping point. Today, we are proud to announce another big step toward that goal; Discovery Communications has acquired TreeHugger.

This means that more money will be invested in TreeHugger and their Digg-lookalike site Hugg. In return TreeHugger will help Discovery Communications with the new site Planet Green that is currently being built.

http://www.treehugger.com
http://www.hugg.com
http://www.discovery.com

A new, solar-powered web host for consumers and small businesses was successfully launched yesterday. Greenest Host powers its data centres entirely using solar panels. Greenest Host also uses propane- and conventional grid-based backup systems if there for some reasons would be a dark day.

The hosting plans starts at $14.95 per month for 1GB of space and 5GB of monthly data transfer.

Greenest Host will be added to our Green Web Host list later today and reviewed by someone in the Green Blog team in a very near future. Stay tuned!

(more…)