Your Contribution to Global Warming or is it just PR?

On the eve of todays UN report that points the finger at all of us for warming up our planet, many city landmarks in Europe turned off the lights for 5 minutes. A gesture to bring attention to the issue of global warming. I had good intentions of personally doing it but simply forgot to do it at the common time! But it does set me wondering whether despite the good intentions of the likes of the Eiffel Tower and other city administrations whether for them it was really an effort just to improve their public relations.

Why is the Eiffel Tower lit all night? Why do advertising signs need to be on 24/7? There must be times when very few people see them lit up. How about a public campaign for our local authorities and businesses to TURN OFF for more than 5 minutes.

Tom Chandler of the Copywriter Underground gives us his take on his own efforts to keep the trout in the river and the snow on the mountains in northern California in a post. He offsets his carbon useage with a organisation called TerraPass. This seems to be US only; I'm looking for a similar organisation for Europe – post any links in the comments please.

TerraPass tells me that my air travel to Brussels this year will produce something like 13000 pounds of CO2 and my car will belch out 9000 pounds of CO2. My conscience can be saved if I pay $120 towards energy conservation projects!

Did you know that? "More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we’re not using them. If we could just improve the efficiency of how we use our PCs, the savings in energy costs would be over $3 billion dollars! The CO2 emissions from just 15 computers are equivalent in energy terms to the gas consumption used by one car."

 Local Cooling has a desktop application that helps you manage the power usage of your computer and tells you how many trees you are saving and how many gallons of oil you haven't used to generate power. You will be surprised at the savings you can make! Yes, these little efforts are also gestures but they do last longer than 5 minutes- give them a try and tell us in the comments of any other ways to contribute to reducing global warming.