Carbon emissions: facts to make a difference

Nowadays a day seldom goes by without some piece of news regarding the sorry state and dismal prospects of the Earth's environment. These are the days of inconvenient truths. Opinions are numerous, conceptual ideas abound,  more or less scientific and rigorous conclusions widely distributed and each person responds in their own way. Some will feel anxious, others don't know or pretend not to know (so they can drive an over-sized car with an engine that makes a noise that is music to their ears), others still feel a century is too long a time to worry and a few do what they can to help.
The point however is that we all seem to be like drivers or airplane pilots deprived of instruments, flying or driving blindly in the worrying knowledge that the wall we will hit is getting dangerously close. That's the key issue: we lack data about the impact of our daily micro-decisions on the environment even though there are all sorts of calculators of environmental impact out there. What we do not have is a means to measure what is going on as it's happening, which is really a pity in a world so connected. That's precisely one of the challenges OpenSpime, the self proclaimed "infrastructure company for an open internet of things", seems to be addressing with a pretty cool infrastructure that combines sensors, software, the Internet and mashups to deliver actual maps of carbon dioxide emissions. A good friend of mine is their CTO and I am impressed with what these guys are presenting in this video:

Comments

[Roberto Ostinelli]

thank you alex for this window.

glad to share with you the fact that bruce sterling has posted, again, an entry in his blog on WIRED http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/03/more-about-tori.html>and that we are also on yahoo! developer's network http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2008/03/_size75_download_m4v_1.html.

at usual, you were on the spot at the very beginning of things :)

r.