M is for Myg

It’s blog action day and we here at M is for Myg want to remind you that we’re all on a fast train to a special hell called “Global Warming.” Okay, fine then. “Global Climate Change.” But the change isn’t in any way good from what I can tell.

And as much as I love technology and computers and all things electronic (including an obscene amount of loud electric guitar gear), I can’t help but feel toadish at the thought of all the energy I’ve consumed with my life of energy abundance.

There are some groups in Second Life who’ve tried to raise awareness of how our digital selves contribute to the problem. National Geographic online posted an article last April about the staging of a flood related to Global Warming by the group Adventure Ecology. The article casually throws out that a Second Life avatar uses as much energy as the average Brazilian. Holy shit - can that really be true? I tried to find some others in Second Life - please comment here if you know of anyone doing good work in-world on environmental causes.

Here, look at a picture of Burgess riding Orca while pondering the fact that in this picture, he’s using as much energy as the average Brazilian! And that’s without the great food and party atmosphere!

Greenpeace offers a Guide to Greener Electronics, calling out the makers of my beloved Macbook Pro - Apple - for dropping behind the competition in efforts to go green with production. As someone who’s spent far too much money on Apple products this year, that really pisses me off. Here’s what they say about their impact.

But none of us can wait for companies or politicians to actually get this problem under control. We need to so something more drastic to slow the train down, as while the idea of hell might be kind of cool, the reality of global climate change is nothing of the sort. As individuals we can take more impressive steps to hit the brakes.

Today I’m making the commitment to head over to NativeEnergy - a portal to offsetting your impact as an individual, business, or organization. There you can calculate your impact on the environment and give money to support renewable energy projects that will reduce the amount of energy produced by fossil fuels. That means cleaner energy - and less CO2 pollution to contribute to the problem.

So I hope you’ll head on over there and learn about Global Climate Change. I’m going to be pledging some hard earned dough, because while I can turn off lights and drive less, I really don’t want to give up my laptop or my Jazzmaster any time soon, and not if there are ways to help push the clean energy agenda forward.

Yep, that’s what I’m doing today. Hope you will too.

Ed. update: Dosh Dosh has a great list of environmental blogs, for those who want to study it on up.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 10:26 am and is filed under Real Life, Second Life.