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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From right here in Austin, a fellow named Peter Smith is leveraging the power of Blog to advocate for a new feature in Google Maps, “Bike There.” According to Smith, his blog and petition (27,000 signatures as of this writing) were created “to ask Google to help us make the world safer for bicyclists by adding bicycle routes to Google Maps.”

It’s interesting to think about the power that this kind of integration would have, as compared to a mashup. Part of the genius of the Goog’s mapping system is that it can be used for mapping just about anything, but can it be repurposed for wayfinding? While there are countless genius Gmaps mashups out there, it seems that providing useful wayfinding information is not quite as simple as plotting points. To find the best bike route from my house to yours, something more powerful is probably necessary.

Google Transit

For wayfinding on Gmaps, Google started with car travel directions, and expanded a year ago to include public transit. If you’ve never used Google Transit, I encourage you to take a look. It’s integrated with the Google maps interface: any time you choose to “Get Directions”, there will be an option to “Take Public Transit” if you live in a city that has provided transit data to Google.

A nice little flourish in the Transit interface is a price comparison: it will show your transit fare against an estimated cost of driving a car the same distance. Of course, biking there would cost next to nothing.

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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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Data visualizations tell a story. When executed well, visualizations bring a level of clarity to an aspect of the world impossible otherwise. Here’s a very simple example, using a map.

Climate Progress recently posted about a Google Maps mashup that utilizes data from the California Energy Commission to show the rapid growth of solar energy (in particular, photovoltaic) in California over the last decade. It’s actually quite dramatic, and tells a hopeful story.

Climate Progress has some interesting points about the factors that made PV economic in California and New Jersey. (The states combined made up 80% of the market in PV in 2006. )

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