Eco Friendly Hosting $3.75/mo.

With Earth Day right around the corner, you might be wincing at the idea of paying a web host that uses electricity from a coal fired power plant to run the server that hosts your blog or website. Then, to add insult to injury, it draws more coal burning electricity to cool the server racks so the circuitry doesn’t melt down. Something just doesn’t feel right, especially if your mission involves being kind to the Earth and its residents.

No need to compromise your values when you can get eco-friendly hosting services for under $4 a month. Why, those inconsiderate global warmers probably charge more than that!

The service you are looking for is called Dotster. It’s a company with a catchy name and a great value in domains and web hosting services. Can you believe that basic web hosting is just $3.75 a month? Would you further believe that Dotster has an entire eco-friendly agenda? Let’s take a look at their green hosting program and then see how much you can get for so little money.

The reality of business is that not every location has room for those huge windmills that generate massive amounts of power at competitive rates. But, every business can buy their power from alternative energy sources if they wish. That’s what Dotster does. They purchase enough renewable energy credits to offset 150% of the energy it takes to run their hosting services. That’s half again as much as they’d need to just to claim green hosting. Those credits come from Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) that restores watersheds, puts solar panels on schools and builds small scale solar and wind projects.

The model is that if you can’t generate or use power directly from wind or solar feeding your location, then pay to build those resources elsewhere so they can feed the grid and displace dirty generation facilities. If every business did this, we’d be awash in clean energy and be busy recycling fossil fuel generation equipment for other purposes.

Dotster goes beyond just paying for green power. They actively work to reduce the power they consume by upgrading their hosting infrastructure with high efficiency servers. That’s a double win because every kilowatt not used is a kilowatt that doesn’t need a generator at all. On top of every thing else, Dotster will plant a tree for you when you buy a hosting package. Those trees come from Trees for the Future, which as a 2012 action plan to plant over 17 million trees. Yours could be one of them!

Now, let’s see what this incredibly affordable hosting service really gives you for your $3.75 a month. First of all, you get Linux hosting, the industry standard, with 10 GB of website disk space and 300 GB of bandwidth. There are few websites, indeed, that can blow through that much storage and bandwidth for a single domain. That’s what this plan is tailored for. It’s for hosting one domain, be it a website, blog, or some combination of the two. Note that you can have unlimited subdomains if you wish to subdivide your domain into smaller units.

You also get 100 email accounts, 5 FTP logins, 10 MySQL Databases, and a SiteBuilder that lets you easily create a website with up to 15 pages using your only your web browser. Yes, the server runs PHP5 and Perl/Python, with free applications that include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHPMyChat, Classifieds, Post-Nuke, TikiWiki and a bunch of others.

As of this writing, Dotster is also offering a free domain name for a year with any of the hosting plans. Look for the grey offer box on the Linux Hosting or Windows Hosting pages. Windows hosting? Yes, you can also get Windows hosting for a little more money ($4.75 a month) if that’s what you would prefer. Both Linux and Windows hosting are available with larger resources that scale to unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space if you really need that much.

Is there any reason to go with some smoke belching legacy hosting service when you can get eco-friendly webhosting that you can be proud of at such a great price? Well, what are you waiting for? Learn more and get your eco friendly hosting for $3.75 a month right now. You can lock in for 1, 2 or 3 years to know in advance how much your hosting budget will be down the road.

Environmentally Friendly Hosting is Super Green

More and more website builders and bloggers are looking for ways to embrace both technology and the environment. Here’s a way to not just go green, but super-green with Super Green hosting. Let’s take a look at what’s super about Super Green.

It starts with their "green ethics". Super Green Hosting started out with the goal to provide the greenest service available in the green web hosting market. It all comes down to the carbon. Do you realize that everything we do on the Internet has a carbon footprint? That’s because everything draws electricity and most of that electricity is being generated from sources that are decidedly un-green. Coal fired power stations - very, very un-green.

The way to counteract this is to cut back on the power you use, generate the rest using renewable resources such as solar and wind, and plant trees to absorb remaining carbon in the form of CO2 and store it away.

Super Green hosting does all three. They’re using dell servers that produce 20% less CO2 than average servers, using wind power to run them and planting trees to reverse the effects of global warming. They can boast of being 100% carbon-neutral. That’s hosting you can be proud of.

Unlike may hosting providers, Super Green Hosting keeps their plans simple but feature rich. For less than five bucks a month, you get unlimited hosting space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited email accounts. With all those resources at your disposal, you can host as many domains as you want. But don’t pay for the first one. Super Green Hosting will give you a free domain and take care of renewing if for as long as you have your account. Already have a domain elsewhere? No problem, they’ll transfer it for you so you can use it in your account.

Some other included features that you might have to pay extra for elsewhere are 1 click installation for WordPress and Joomla, as many MySQL databases as you can use, Ruby/Ruby On Rails, SSL Secure Serve, shopping cards, a free generated certificate, Paypal support, merchant account support, and free ad credits for Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Also take note of their 99.9% uptime guarantee and their money back guarantee, along with 24/7 phone and email support, live support inside cPanel, video tutorials and extensive knowledgebase.

Most bloggers and website builders will be happy with the standard Green Hosting plan. For resellers and owners of extensive domain collections that want complete and independent control of each website, there are Green Reseller Hosting plans available starting at under twenty bucks a month. These offer both cPanel and WHM admin control panels, automated billing systems, site builder software, website templates and private name servers. One unusual benefit is a domain reseller account. This is a free eNom account for cheaper rates on domains with no setup fees.

Are you in the market for green hosting solutions with the power and flexibility to handle anything from a WordPress blog right on up to online business and even being a web hosting provider yourself? If so, check out the Green Hosting and Green Reseller Hosting plans available from Super Green Hosting.

Even If There Is No Global Warming

Global warming is heating up. Regardless of what the atmosphere is doing at the moment, the rhetoric on climate change is getting hot and proponents on both sides of the issue are getting really hot... under the collar. The irony is that green energy makes sense regardless of whether we’re about to boil over or freeze our toes off.

To be sure, the consensus among the most respected scientific minds worldwide is that the average temperature of the planet is increasing and our industrial age emissions of carbon dioxide are causing it. But for the sake of discussion, let’s say it isn’t so. Let’s say that we’re just riding natural changes in the climate that are driven by subtle variations in the sun’s energy output, wobbles in the Earth’s orbit, a rash of volcanic eruptions or whatever. What if any or all of these influences are really what we’re observing?

The best answer might be: “So what?”

There are really good reasons for us to behave like CO2 is bringing disaster upon our heads, regardless of the scientific connection. We need to change our relationship with energy or disaster will come down upon us and likely sooner rather than later. In fact, we could be in deep trouble long before Florida slips below the waves and it will have nothing to do with carbon-anything.

We are currently in the midst of one nasty recession that has had the side effect of buying us valuable time on both the climate and energy fronts. All those tankers parked in the Persian Gulf and the dearth of oil exploration are evidence that we’re not consuming energy, especially oil energy, at anything like the rate we expected a few years ago. Before people started throwing punches over global warming, the big fight was over peak oil. That’s the prediction that we’re draining old oil wells faster than we’re finding new ones to replace them. The forecaster was M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil researcher, who had the gall to announce in 1957 that U.S. oil production would peak in the late 60’s to early 70’s. A lot of well meaning dissenters thought he was nuts until, right on schedule, our production topped out in 1970.

Well, guess what? There is also a peak oil prediction for global oil production. By some expectations we should have already passed it. Most likely we’ve been spared by those nasty recessions that followed the bursting of the tech bubble and now the housing bubble. It’s just a short term reprieve, however. As soon as business starts kicking back into high gear we’re going to realize that we’re strapped for oil and those $4 and $5 a gallon gas prices will be back in no time. Perhaps worse, as we’re doing nothing to increase the supply at the moment.

To be sure, we’re not on the verge of running out of oil anytime soon. What we’re on the verge of is running out of the cheap, sweet, light crude that we’ve all come to know and love. Half of it is still in the ground, but there are a lot more of us who want it and the price is going to spiral upward as we try to outbid and perhaps out shoot each other to get it. What’s in plentiful supply are the gooey tar sands and other thick sulfur-laden muck that cost a fortune to turn into the nice sweet light gasoline and diesel that won’t clog up your injectors.

The choice we’re facing is to persist in slugging it out over the remaining oil reserves and keep coming up with more and more money to get it one way or the other, or break the cycle by moving off oil and onto something more promising before the situation is totally hopeless. That something is green energy. A generation ago, solar panels and wind generators were scientific curiosities that only made economic sense in unique situations. Now they’re in mass production with costs that can be easily be paid back within the lifetime of the equipment. Are green sources as cost effective as coal, oil and natural gas? Wind is almost at parity, with solar not that far behind. We haven’t even started to tap wave and tidal energy for coastal cities, nor geothermal for areas where it’s boiling hot close to the surface.

Even if all we do is keep squabbling, the production learning curve will continue to reduce the cost of green energy until it becomes the obvious choice. Wouldn’t it be smarter to embrace the change now and gain the advantages sooner? Green energy gives us an unlimited source of power with energy that is naturally provided by the Sun (solar and wind) and the Moon (tidal). There’s no worry about investing in “dry holes.” It gives us national security in that no other country can take away our sunshine and breezes. Any money we invest in the generating equipment and maintenance, we could be paying to ourselves. That’s domestic security, a reduction in the portion of our national debt that comes from paying for foreign oil, and employment that is easy to keep on-shore.

Green technology and manufacturing practices also give us efficiency improvements that result in less energy needed for a given process and lower costs through recycling, rather than always starting with mining raw minerals and ending with paying to bury perfectly good processed materials when we’re done with the product.

Green energy production and green product technology complement each other. From an efficiency standpoint, they “pull in the same direction” and accelerate the cost and supply advantages we’d gain over industrial-age technologies based on fossil fuels. It’s a win-win situation and, if we’re smart about it, we’ll be the winners.

Banish Vampires To Reduce Global Warming

There’s something with tiny little teeth sucking on your electrical wires. The blood it draws isn’t just electrical current. It’s your money, a few cents at a time. It’s also your future, because while it’s trying to drain your bank account, it’s also heating the atmosphere and indirectly belching greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. What kind of a hideous creature could do this? One that’s a parasite on the equipment that you want and need for your business and home. It’s the dreaded electronic vampire!

Well, it should be dreaded. Sadly, it generally isn’t. If this was the type of vampire that lurched from behind a curtain and bit you in the neck, you’d quake in fear at its mere mention. But this vampire is more insidious. It hides inside perfectly acceptable electrical devices and does its biting behind your back. The damage isn’t a couple of bloody punctures from an attack that’s over in minutes. It’s a steady sip, sip, sipping of your precious resources. But the result is eventually the same as if you were attacked. You wake up and your whole world has changed.

So where do these electronic vampires live and how do you spot them?

That’s the tough part. These vampires are something like body snatchers, only for things that use electricity. They’re buried inside. You’ll know they’re around, though, because they leave indications. The first indication is a glowing light. Does anything you plug-in have a small red or green light that never goes off? Suspect a vampire inside. Is there any other visual indication of activity when you turn the equipment off? This might be an LCD display that still shows information, particularly a digital clock. It could be the sound of a fan running or the click-click-click of a hard drive being accessed. It could be a case that’s slightly warm to the touch. All of these are sure-fire indicators of a vampire inside.

One certain tip-off to vampire circuitry is a remote control. The remote runs on batteries and is likely not drawing any power until you push a button. But the device that it controls has to be awake to see the invisible beam of the remote. Even if the front panel is completely dark, there’s something hooked to an infrared detector or UHF receiver that continuously draws power on the odd chance that someone is going to push a remote button soon.

The new wireless network devices are power vampires. WiFi b/g/n is a power-intensive technology. That’s why smartphone and laptop computer manuals suggest you turn off WiFi access when you aren’t using it so your battery will last longer.

The truth is that the power switch is rarely a power switch anymore. It’s a stand-by switch. All you are doing when you turn off a computer, a television set, a printer, or even a coffee pot is switching the device from the high power to the low power consumption mode. A true power switch physically breaks the electrical circuit so that no electrons can flow.

The whole vampire power problem got started because people got antsy waiting for their vacuum tube television sets to warm up. They wanted instant-on. The only way to do that is to keep the picture tube filament on and up to temperature. It’s just like leaving a light bulb on all the time in a closet where you don’t see it. It’s still on, drawing power and producing heat.

Back in the vacuum tube days, there was no concern over continuous power draw in TVs nor any mention of global warming. But now we know better and more things than ever are drawing vampire power. Just how significant is it? Studies suggest that standby power draw can range from around 5% to over 25% of total energy consumption. Think about it. If we banished the vampires completely, homes and businesses would cut their monthly expenses by a significant amount and numerous coal-fueled power stations could be switched off with no adverse affect.

The effect of eliminating vampire standby power is even more significant. Every device that uses power generates heat. There may be no measurable effect on warming the entire atmosphere directly, but all that heat has to be dealt with indoors. That means extra air conditioning load in the summer that leads to more electrical draw and more demand on coal-fired electric generators.

If you are wondering just how much you are losing to the vampires, a good way to find out is to use a device like the Kill A Watt energy usage monitor. Plug it into the wall, plug your computer or other device into the monitor and read the meter when you have your device in both the ON and STANDBY modes. Add up the standby draw from all the devices you are powering and be prepared for a shocking total. Sometimes you can just look at the power specifications for the equipment in question. The manufacture will often unabashedly quote standby power even when it is 30 or 60 watts for a device that only draws a few hundred watts at full power.

How can you take action? Since the problem is distributed, you need to actually turn off anything that plugs into the wall that isn’t currently being used. That means a wall switch that controls the outlet or a power strip with a switch. You need surge protector power strips anyway to protect your valuable equipment. Keep the switch readily accessible and turn it off overnight or when you know you won’t need the equipment for awhile. It will come alive from a complete power shutdown soon enough when you return. Be sure to unplug those modular “wall wart” power supplies that are used to power smaller equipment and charge mobile devices like cell phones and MP3 players. That little black transformer is a tiny vampire in itself.

Some manufacturers are becoming more sensitive to the standby power problem. My laser printer has a sleep mode, but it also has a mechanical power off rocker switch. I’ve taken to turning the power off when I’m done for the day and only back on when it is next needed. During the day it goes into sleep mode, which is at least some power savings. Other companies are offering ultra low power modes of 1 watt or less when on standby. It’s not perfect, but it is a good compromise when you have something that really needs to be instantly available or if you’re not good at remembering to flick the power switch.

Just remember that every vampire banished is one more that won’t be biting your wallet or infecting us all with more global warming. If you find the prospect of global warming disturbing, there are many more great posts to read as part of Today’s (October 15, 2009) Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change.

You may also be interested in reading our other posts this week related to climate change and technology. They are:

Monday: Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.

Tuesday: The Green Energy Fairy Tale Is Real.

Wednesday: Every Home And Business Is A Battery.

Every Home And Business Is A Battery

As part of Blog Action Day 2009, we’re dedicating this week’s posts to the topics of global warming, climate change and alternative energy. Yesterday’s installment presented the case that alternative energy is a fairy tale no more. It’s mature technology that only needs a little national fervor to make it the power of choice. It’s pretty hard to argue with the “shovel ready” nature of solar and wind when there is already so much installed base and even smaller scale units showing up for sale in hardware stores. But skeptics still cast a suspicious eye. Often that suspicion is voiced by the question, “So what do you do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?”

That’s a fair concern. After all, the sun still sets every evening and winds blow sporadically in most locations. If you don’t want your lights getting brighter and dimmer, you need something to smooth out the fluctuations. That something is energy storage.

Coal, nuclear and natural gas fired generating plants don’t need storage. The energy storage is built into the fuel. There is also a short-term energy reserve in the steam boilers that only heat up and cool down so fast. Not so with windmills and solar panels. They have no fuel. They extract energy that is directed at them and only while they have access to that energy source.

At first glance, this appears to be a show-stopper for alternative energy. But it’s really not that bad. The sun doesn’t shine at night, but most of us don’t either. When it gets dark, we go home and shut down offices, factories, schools and stores. The biggest energy demand is during the day. That’s also the biggest demand for air conditioning, because the same sun that makes it bright outside and lets solar panels tap it for electricity also heats everything up. The wind doesn’t blow all the time either, but it’s usually blowing somewhere. That’s the value of an energy grid. Sources that contribute energy feed the grid and users that need energy tap it.

Some of the difference between supply and demand can be handled by base load generators. These are things like nuclear power, geothermal, and natural gas generators that can produce at a steady rate regardless of what’s going on with the weather.

But really making good use of clean energy sources that may generate too much power some times and not enough at other times requires storage. Users that are so far “off the grid” that it’s too expensive to string wires to their cabins often use lead acid storage batteries. Wind and solar generators charge up the batteries when they can. The user draws power from the batteries as needed.

Batteries are a good idea, but the automobile style lead acid batteries have some limitations. You need a lot of them to store much energy, so they take up a lot of room. They emit nasty gasses that need to be vented. Battery life is also more limited than we would like.

Nickel-metal hydride batteries are more energy dense and are the battery of choice for today’s hybrid cars. Lithium ion batteries can store even more energy per cubic foot and are the batteries chosen for plug-in hybrids and electric cars. They’re a bit pricey when you get to the capacities needed to run a home or business, but that’s soon to change. As Li-ion batteries get into mass production in vehicle sizes, the prices will plummet. How soon before they’re reasonably priced for fixed location battery backup?

What I’m talking about is a unit about the size of a furnace that will have a battery, inverter and control circuitry suitable to run the entire electrical load of a residence or small business. Power outages will be a thing of the past. Feed one of these from solar panels on the roof or a wind generator out back and you can go off the grid any time you want and avoid paying the electric company for power. Or, better yet, let them pay you for power.

Rather than round up all the batteries and put them at the generating station, why not distribute both generation and storage of electrical power? The grid still makes sense for sharing power among users. Those who are power rich can sell their excess capacity. Those who have demanding needs, like steel mills, street lights, and buildings without generation or storage will just pay the electric bill like today. The difference is that most of the generating sources can be green. The system will be more robust because a million small resources aren’t as likely to go out of service at the same time as one or two large generators.

The availability of reasonably priced generation and storage may give rise to a new era of energy entrepreneurs. Savvy producers will want to sell as much as possible during the heavy-demand daylight hours to get the best price possible. At night, they could even draw off the grid at lower prices to run their own lights and recharge their batteries. How about the family energy farm? A field of windmills and solar roof panels augmented by fields of corn for ethanol between the wind generator towers may offer the kind of income that makes independent rural life really attractive again. Factories and warehouses with large flat roofs offer ready real estate to load up with angled solar panels to eliminate power bills and become a revenue source. Ever shrinking payback periods are making this type of investment more and more practical.

Alternative energy is a key piece in putting the brakes on climate change before our environment degenerates into something that we’ll really hate dealing with. If you share our interest in this important topic, you’ll be interested in the huge collection of articles being posted on blogs worldwide as part of Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. The official event is October 15, but we’re participating all week with articles on this subject. Come back tomorrow for our feature on banishing power vampires that suck your “juice.” Say, isn’t Halloween just around the corner?

The Green Energy Fairy Tale is Real

How many decades have we been treated to a magical fairy tale of the future, where fantastic power sources like solar, wind, tidal, wave motion and maybe fusion will create a second Eden for us? It would be a world where unlimited energy provides a picture-perfect environment. Oh, but that’s not for now. Today we need wallow in the dirty world of coal and oil because those technologies are all that are practical with the technology we have at hand.

Every time I hear that, I have to look around to see if we are all dressed like characters in a Dickens novel. Are you kidding, Scrooge? We could rid ourselves of dirty energy right now... if we wanted to.

The problem is that we are living in a fog of our own making. I’m not talking about the haze that settles over Los Angeles and other major cities around the world due to air pollution. I’m talking about a mental fog that we can’t see our way clear of. Like many myths, it’s so ingrained and potent that we believe it with all our hearts and souls. The problem is that it’s just plain wrong.

Remember the Apollo Moon program? I do. As a kid, I liked to watch the rockets blow up every time they tried to launch one in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Then President Kennedy said we were going to the Moon and come back safely within the decade. So, we did.

Clean energy is a far more mature technology today than rocketry was in my youth. Everything you need to power your home or business from solar or wind energy is an off-the-shelf item with a manufacturer’s warranty. Hybrid cars with double the MPG ratings of their non-hybird equivalents are sitting in show rooms, shined up and ready to drive off the lot.

Oh, but those are just toys for people who are willing to pay through the nose to be early adopters. Aren’t they? No, Scrooge, this stuff is mainstream now. In nearly all locations there is enough sunlight that you can make your electric meter run backwards with just the spread of solar panels that will cover the roof of your house. I just saw a wind generator on sale at one of the big box hardware stores. My Camry Hybrid routinely gets twice the milage of my previous Olds Cutlass Supreme and offers the same power and even more cabin room.

What’s wrong here is that there is no national fervor yet for energy independence nor slowing climate change. If there was, what would it look like? Let’s try to see an alternative dream.

This is a dream where every home has a roof made of solar panels and an inverter connected to the power grid. You don’t buy electricity any more, you sell it. Your electric bill is zero. Every flat roof of a commercial, government, school, or hospital building is also beset with solar panels. They’re often hard to see from the ground, but from the air it’s one great sea of power panels. Out in the country, every farm has at least one windmill that provides a secure income for the farm families regardless of what crop prices are doing. A barn roof full of solar panels adds to that residual income and powers the farm.

This mass adoption on on-site power generation means those dirty coal plants can just be shut down or converted to natural gas peaker plants that run only as needed to supplement the green energy sources. Nuclear plants provide a reliable base load capability with no realistic threat of poisoning the public. Our one domestic close call was the Three Mile Island accident 30 years ago where nobody was hurt. But it spooked us so badly that we’ve shunned nukes ever since. About 40,000 people are killed in traffic accidents per year or about 1,200,000 dead in the 30 years since Three Mile Island and yet there’s no outcry to shun cars. See how powerful these mental fogs are?

The President and other world leaders are seriously considering another round of nuclear weapons reductions. So do we just chop those warheads up and hide the radioactive parts inside a mountain in Nevada? No way. There’s our bridge fuel to make the switch from dirty to clean energy. When we’ve transitioned, we can reprocess the rods until they are nearly non-radioactive and stow what’s left for future generations to learn how to harness.

We use about 9 million barrels per day of oil for gasoline. If we simply doubled the mileage of our vehicles by switching to those hybrids that are ready to go, we could cut that to 4.5 million, which is less than the 5 million barrels per day that we produce in the U.S. That’s energy security, plus we’d cut the greenhouse gas contribution from cars in half. The next generation of plug-in hybrids and electric cars will use even less in the way of liquid hydrocarbon fuels and will create only a pittance of greenhouse gasses if we are smart enough to generate the electricity from sunlight, wind, and nuclear.

That’s not all of the oil we use, but by what insanity are we still burning oil other than for transportation? A crash program to convert all oil fueled generating stations to natural gas and switch the Northeastern U.S. from heating oil to natural gas and/or electric would get rid of the need to scratch around for new oil wells and dramatically cut greenhouse emissions. This conversion project would be a good use for current and future national infrastructure investments. We’re talking a jobs program at a time of record unemployment, an efficiency improvement that will save business and residential users money on their heating bills, and a major reduction in pollution and global warming emissions.

So, do we put on our Victorian attire and pretend we’re still living in the 19th century or do we cut through the fog that’s holding us back and demand to make alternative energy our next national passion? If we pursued green energy with the fervor that got us to the moon, we could simultaneously solve our job creation, global warming, economic security, and energy production problems. The whole new can-do 21st century attitude we’d acquire would be a bonus.

Do you think that as a nation we could be doing a much better job of converting to new energy resources to stem the accelerating rate of climate change that is upon us? If so, you’ll find many more inspiring posts to read on Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change on Thursday, October 15. Visit www.blogactionday.org for suggestions on how you, too, can participate.

At T1 Rex's Business Telecom Explainer, we’re blogging on the subject of climate change the entire week. You may also enjoy reading our kick-off post, “Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.”

Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow

Hey, you in the server room. Is it hot enough for you? No? Well, just wait until tomorrow.

Global warming is upon us. All the dire warnings from Al Gore, the reports you hear on TV and read in magazines and newspapers, and everything on the blogosphere isn’t really about heading off some future climate change. It’s a hope and a plea that we can keep it from becoming catastrophic.

Make no mistake about it, things are heating up. Not just the discussion, mind you. It’s actually getting warmer outside. As a resident of that rustbelt tundra known as the Midwest, I know that’s a hard concept to buy when your toes get frostbit just running for the mail in mid-January. This last winter in Northern Illinois was a cruel and bitter joke after a couple decades of frequent El Nino moderation. The summer has also been more temperate than any in recent memory. But look at what’s happening in the Arctic Ocean. Shipping companies are downright giddy about that pesky sea ice disappearing to reveal a shortcut for hauling containers of “stuff” between trading nations. The Russians made a big production out of planting their flag from a submarine below the North Pole. Nobody wanted that forsaken wasteland before the lucky confluence of massive oil reserve discoveries and rising sea temperatures. They are now anxiously awaiting the day when Santa’s workshop sinks like the Titanic, clearing the area so that drilling projects can proceed unimpeded.

Like flying in a cloud bank, your senses are inferior to instruments in knowing which way is up, or whether global warming is real when your eyeglasses are frosting over. Perhaps this is why the term climate change is easier to swallow. One’s intuition tells you that something strange is going on when California is burning to the ground and polar bears are taking over the sport of synchronized swimming. What’s it going to feel like when Bedouins relocate to Iowa because that’s where the sand is?

If we really are going to hell in a CO2 handbasket, though, where is the panic? You don’t see middle-age men stapling thermometers to fishing hats and screaming their lungs out at town hall meetings. There are no organized “ice baggers” with their Isn’t Cool Enough movement demanding that the government lower temperatures. How come there’s no Hot News Channel with multimillionaire cheerleaders riling up public emotions?

That day is coming. Right now climate-everything is on the back burner as we’re preoccupied with punching each other in the face over government versus insurance company death panels and which failed bankers deserve the biggest of the billion dollar bonuses. Eventually, all this will pass and someone will pipe up, “Hey, how ‘bout that climate change?”

But why wait for the deck to clear before we start dealing with the inevitable? Not everyone is prepared to hold indefinitely for the Gosselins to reconcile and clear some column inches and television news segments so that there’s room for a serious discussion on how we can ameliorate a thermal meltdown. Blog Action Day 2009 on October 15 is perhaps the kickoff event that nudges the focus of public discussion toward the universal challenge that is climate change.

What is Blog Action Day? It’s a coordinated effort to engage the power of new media to “change the global conversation.” The idea is that bloggers worldwide join forces on one day of the year to all write on a particular topic of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 is dedicated to the subject of climate change. Thousands of blogs, including at least 11 of the world’s top 100 blogs, will all be presenting thoughtful posts related to emerging technology, health issues, poverty and conflict, eco-friendly consumerism, financing, government policy and sustainable design, among other topics. The focus of each participating blog will related to the subject of climate change on that particular day, which happens to be this coming Thursday, the 15th.

As you might have guessed by now, T1 Rex’s Business Telecom Explainer is participating in Blog Action Day and will be presenting a special article on banishing power vampires as the October 15 post. But I’ve decided that this initiative really deserves more than a single day’s effort. So every post this week will be in some way related to climate change and our focus of technology. I hope that you enjoy these articles and will participate in the discussion with your considered comments.

If you also write a blog, will you join us in this special project? Your voice is both welcome and needed. You can participate by registering your blog for free at the web site for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. While you are there, pick up a badge for your blog, like the one shown on this post. Leave a comment here with a link to your Thursday post, as I’d love to read what fellow bloggers have to say on this important and timely issue.