via Protagonists of the Collaborative Consumption Movement

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Significantly, the application connects the carbon footprint of my daily trips to actions I can take to offset it: on one tab, Eco2Go tells me how to take the same trip using public transit, and on another tab, it’s easy to buy carbon credits as I go. There’s a feedback mechanism, and clear paths to action.

I like that the designers chose to focus on one thing – my movements by car. It doesn’t overwhelm me and it aspires to do one thing very well: it helps me drive less, and if I have to drive, it helps me account for my driving’s environmental impact. As a model for a simple green tool, Eco2Go has the goods: it raises my awareness, teaches me alternatives, and empowers me.

Taking it even further, a social tab connects me to the broader community of Eco2Go users. There’s a lot of potential for a pretty cool social app that brings all the data to bear, and it looks like the Eco2Go designers are laying the groundwork.

Eco2Go is intended for the Google Android platform and was recently selected as one of the Top 50 finalists for the Google Android Developer Challenge (out of a talented field of 1700+ entrants).

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After signing up, you’re asked to work through some questions about your lifestyle, to gauge where you are now, and where you can make an impact. This creates your Edenbee “Lifestyle Profile.” Edenbee immediately recommends some goals (”Take your next holiday close to home,” or “Use public transit whenever you can”) and then invites you to find more that match the changes you’re hoping to make.

This social goal-setting system is particularly interesting because it encourages discussions that are purpose-driven and relate directly to the environmental impact of “Lifestyle” and “Logbook”. People can tell stories and ask questions about any goal; for example, on the “I’ll compost all my food waste” page, people might trade tips on best practices in backyard composting. One can imagine even finding potential compadres who are working on making some of the same changes (And of course, groups provide a tried-and-true avenue to finding others). Like 43 Things, a pioneer in social goal-setting, Edenbee encourages not only information-sharing, but a way for people to cheer each other on.

It will be interesting to see how Edenbee puts the carbon calculator & log integrated with the site to new uses. When you combine a social network with familiar tools you can get some pretty neat things. From the synthesis we might see emergent behaviors, like a little friendly competition: the footprints of group members are averaged to create group footprints, and with a little flourish those can turn into teams, and tournaments. Throw in some collective goal-setting, and carbon footprinting’s a whole new ballgame.

If you’d like to try it out, comment here and I’ll send you an invite. Or, if you’re signed up already, let’s be friends.

*or as they like to say, “Beeta”.

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The downside of all that travel, of course, isn’t just an achey back, but a whole lot of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The beauty of Dopplr’s plans to integrate carbon calculation is that a user’s motivation to use the system — keeping in touch with colleagues — ostensibly has little to do with creating data about energy or emissions. The designers of the system made a value judgement, and added a new dimension to what Dopplr can be for its users.

It looks like there will be a graphical element to show cumulative as well as cyclical patterns, and an added social dimension, by way of sharing your carbon details with others. I’m looking forward to getting a closer look at this when it’s made public.

*I’d like to recommend Tom Raftery’s blog, where he’s covering a lot of fantastic issues, especially in relation to computing and climate change. Just this week he’s written on Microsoft’s new initiative in the energy efficiency market, and on carbon accounting software. I first spoke with Tom last November during the Web 2.o Conference in Berlin, where he gave a keynote on Reducing Carbon Footprint. He’s been involved in creating a hyper-efficient data center, and has a lot of expertise in the green computing realm.

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Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA), reveals the emissions of power plants and electric utilities across the world. Its database contains information on the carbon emissions of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies.

(CARMA is produced and financed by the Confronting Climate Change Initiative at the Center for Global Development, an independent and non-partisan think tank located in Washington, DC.)

You can search for your city, or your energy provider, and get a fairly straightforward impression of the carbon impact of electricity sources. The information is organized cleanly, so that a glance will show an energy source’s relative emissions and energy output, and you can drill down for details if you want.

The site uses worthwhile visual cues to indicate the intensity of emissions at a source; each energy source gets a simple icon that encapsulates emissions data and the amount of energy generation. The “clean-to-dirty” scale gets cued with color (yes, that’s right: it’s green to red), and the energy output changes the icon size.

The web interface also provides a potentially engaging Google Maps mashup showing the “dirtiest” and the “cleanest” plants, although I found that it doesn’t behave as I’d expect. I want to be able to zoom in on regions and reveal details according to my level of zoom. The zoom functionality on the maps aren’t built that way; you need to use the web site to navigate to a region (or energy provider), and the map on that page reveals corresponding information.

All in all, this looks like a stellar project, and I encourage you to play around with it for a little bit. To software people, one especially interesting aspect of the project will naturally be its API, which enables third parties to access the data and use it for unimagined uses, and essentially give users impressions of the information in new ways.

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Most carbon footprint calculators, for example, use national averages of co2-per-kWh. Fortunately, however, there is one from safeclimate.net (there may be others; I’m not sure) that asks you what state/province and country you are in, and accounts for that in its calculations. That’s better, certainly, though I’d argue that there’s still a long way to go before these calculators are where they need to go.

Designers and engineers need to get cozy with measurements like co2/kWh (pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour), as we give users information appropriate to their context. Utilities need to provide feeds of emissions data along with the energy they’re serving, so that information appliances can utilize them along with utilizing the energy.

We need to move away from the idea that a typical user will do the research and data entry required for most kinds of footprinting, and instead think in terms of augmenting all of our consumables with footprint data. When I buy electric energy, data about where it comes from and its impact should come to my house as well. (AMEE, an initiative based in the UK, is indeed something to watch in the area of CO2 data; it is “designed as a neutral platform to aggregate and distribute all the CO2 data in the world. It combines measurement, profiling and transactional systems to enable this.”)

At the core, though, we’re talking about assisting people with making informed choices, and persuasive information design. Until that pie in the sky appears, there are some interesting projects already underway that will take us part of the way.

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