Are you tired of the boiler plate, run of the mill action emails steadily filling your inbox? Sure you want to help out—you want to change the world, end the war, save the environment, and so on—but does it have to be so boring? Skim the petition, enter your information and details, maybe email some friends; rinse, repeat.

What if instead of the standard request to sign a petition or donate to the cause, you were asked to play a game? Does an interactive and entertaining way to make a difference online sound too good to be true? It isn’t. Environmental action games of various shapes and sizes for all sorts of causes have been popping up all over the web and are beginning to make appearances in many online activists’ inboxes. You can help save whales, learn to reduce waste, calculate your carbon footprint, and my personal favorite–learn about and help bring an end to overfishing.

These games range in complexity and scope and can vary widely in the levels of entertainment and education that they provide. Many of the more entertaining games function in a simple arcade style, there are several games in this mode based on fishing practices in which you control a fish attempting to avoid various hazards and fishing gear. Other environmental action games work on more of a simulation model where the player makes a series of choices and is presented with the consequences of their decisions. While informative, this style doesn’t lend itself to repeated play or function as an interesting break from the daily grind, the way some of the action games do–with features like high score tracking and an increasing level of difficulty as you progress.

The best environmental action games are entertaining, re-playable, and informative. Whats the point to a game that isn’t any fun? Perhaps more importantly how can you create change without educating your audience? When these two qualities are combined to create an effective environmental action game the drudgery of filling out petitions and sending emails can be alleviated. You can have fun while making a difference online!

Three environmental action games to try:

• Whales Revenge is currently the leader of the pack, having generated over 1 million comments to date largely because it’s so fun to play. Its a bit like Missile Defense except with harpoons instead of bombs and bubble blasts instead of missiles. While Whales Revenge has done a remarkable job of collecting signatures and will help you wile away some time, you won’t learn anything by playing it.
• The Garbage Game has you make personal choices regarding a variety of common disposables, then you get to play garbage commissioner for New York City and decide where all that waste and recycling will go. This game is both interesting and informative, but it won’t have you coming back for more.
• Ocean Survivor lets you take control of a bluefin tuna cruising the seas and trying to avoid ending up in a net or on a hook. This game is fun to play, tracks high scores (you get to leave your name just like on Ms Pacman back in the day), and will also teach you about the fishing practice that eventually snags you.

What green games have you played recently?

- Henry Coppola

Picking a good carbon offset provider can be very tricky and usually can take some work. There are some generally accepted key principles that you want to keep in mind while picking an offset provider. Most large offset providers have third party verification, which is when an outside company verifies that the offset provider says they are doing what they are actually doing. Another important principle is permanence; the carbon that is offset is truly permanently not created. The last principle is additionally; the offset can not be business as usual.

You also then have to think about what kind of project you want to be involved in since there are many projects out there. Tree planting is by far the most popular and the most controversial. The key issue is that trees can die from drought, fire, or disease before they offset the promised amount of carbon. When trees are burned in a fire they will release carbon into the air, the exact opposite of what you want them to do. If you follow the news closely, there is new research out almost every week saying trees absorb more carbon than originally thought and a week later the news is that trees absorb less carbon then originally thought. I suggest that you stay away from trees as an offset project.

There are many other great offset projects like; renewable energy certificates, methane capture, and energy reductions. Each renewable energy certificate (RECs, Green Tags) is the creation of 1 megawatt of power usually from a wind turbine. Wind turbine construction is EXTREMELY expensive and selling RECs is a way to pay for it.

Cow dung historically was collected into big pools and allowed to just biodegrade, a byproduct of the biodegradation is methane. Methane is 10 times more potent a green house gas as carbon. One common offset project is to cover the dung fields capture the methane and use it to generate power.

Energy reductions is another important and under rated project. Companies can do many things to reduce the carbon foot print of existing buildings and new construction. There can be such a large reduction in carbon production that you can sell them as an offset project.

There are a few things that I think are important when evaluating a carbon offset provider. I hate when the provider pools your money and can not specify the project. The provider offers more then just tree planting, because it is not the best offset project. Most people tell you third party verification is king, a small provider that is doing a really great project can’t necessary afford to pay for outside verification.

With all those criteria in mind NativeEnergy is the only large scale provider that meets all of them. Some other really great large providers are TerraPass, and Carbonfund.org

Matt Feldman - Carbon Neutral Digest
carbonneutraldigest.com

Toilet paper is one of those things we generally can’t ‘live’ without. We all buy it and I’m sure those of us who choose to buy a recycled toilet/tissue paper have often happily purchased Nouvelle. Safe in the knowledge that you are doing your bit.

Afterall it has a Woodland Trust badge on it and everything - it must be OK? Surely…

Well, sadly the reality is far more murky. Nouvelle is produced by Georgia Pacific and according to the WWF Report on how companies source fibres for tissue paper they don’t fair so well. For example “Land rights conflicts, forest destruction, irresponsible plantations management and illegal harvesting of timber are key issues associated with many of these forest regions”.

To learn more about the specifics of the tissue industry reports go to the WWF website, the information there is much more in-depth than I want to go into in this post and makes for an enlightening read.

But there is more to this story.

Georgia Pacific is owned by Koch industries and those of you out there that already know Koch industries will understand why this information might lead you to change brands. Surprisingly a lot of consumers have probably never heard of Koch even though they are the largest privately owned company in the world - no, really.

Dig a little deeper.

As ever, the Internet is your friend and you can find out a lot of information on your own - here are a couple of interesting links - both of which are from the U.S Department of Justice:

Koch Industries Indicted For Environmental Crimes At Refinery

Koch Industries To Pay Record Fine For Oil Spills In Six States

Wow! and we are just getting warmed up, these guys have been busy for sure. I don’t think I need to go much further - you get what I’m getting at.

The alternatives.
Getting back to toilet paper then, there are alternatives that do come from managed sources. According to the WWF report, looking for the FSC logo on packaging will help as this is the only standard they recognise as assurance that “If virgin fibres are used they need to come from forests managed to the highest environmental and social standards”.

SCA Tissue produce the Naturalle brand in the UK which is 100% recycled and available to UK consumers.

More information on recycled brands here.

Hopefully the WWF will have a new report soon and we will see if anything has changed in the world of tissue and toilet paper. As we effectively flush or trash 270,000 trees per day this is no place for toilet humour.

Global Warming is about a lot things that us humans have done to the earth due to past resources such as gas that runs our cars and it is found in the materials in our plastic bags.So blame the ones who overuse or who rely on this power to much of this power when we should be preserving for when we really need it.

To understand this we will have to look at one element that makes life well alive. Carbon is the central element that makes us move and to have energy to do things. We are a Carbon-based life form. Carbon is a very special element because it can be found practically anywhere it’s in pencils, paper, plants, coal, the food you eat and even in you and down to the smallest cell in your body. Carbon is even unique because of it’s strong force known as a bond. When a Carbon bonds with another element that bond between them has a very strong force holding them together and with in that bond there is stored energy. A professor at MIT says that even when something dies the Carbon bonds still keeps its energy even with death. In fact if you went back a long time ago you would have found a sea in what we call middle east in this sea there were zooplankton and many other creatures that lived in the sea and when they did die there corpses piled on top of corpses compressed over several thousands of years to form this mush we call today Oil which is fossil fuel or ancient life just liquified. Coal is fossil fuel but in a solid form.

Now back to Oil. Oil is used in most anything from Cars to plastic. The only way to break this carbon bond is to excite the carbon and this can be done by a spark or a flame or a some other way. for example if you were to light a piece of paper has carbon with in it and the heat coming off is the excitement of the Carbon, when you eat a apple you break a carbon bond which converts into energy for you to use, when you turn on a gasoline engine the spark ignites and excites the Carbon atoms to break apart and off you go. When you break a carbon bond it almost immediately finds a new partner and whats better than having a stable element such as Oxygen but not just one but two Oxygen. When you break a bond it doesn’t matter if it is a piece of paper, gas or a apple you release CO2 in to the atmosphere. CO2 is a colorless and a odorless gas. CO2 or known as Carbon Dioxide is one of several greenhouse gases which makes about 75% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Most of the greenhouse gases are from cars and industrial plants and power plants. yourself may release CO2 but its in a smaller form so humans are not really part of the problem. When traveling from here to there either using cars, planes, buses, boat to many other things like mowing the grass and shipping items thats when us humans effect our environment. So you could blame the Oil industry for polluting the environment, and they were the ones that killed the electric car but they only wanted to make some money or you could blame your self for not being educated on how the things we do each day effects our atmosphere. Whatever it may be we all effect this atmosphere either in small or big way.

There are things we can do now that will help because there may be a point in time where there may be no point of no return to a better environment which we don’t want to happen right? and think about our future generations to come. Something we can do now to limit our carbon emissions can come very simple as transport. you could cycle to where you have to go, you could walk, you could roller skate/skateboard, you could carpool instead of driving alone you would be transporting one to about eight coworkers/school mates. For food you could buy organic foods that are within 0-100 miles of where you live, buy foods that don’t come in plastic containers unless it has a recyclable sign, you could support your farmers market and don’t have to wonder if your food came from new Zealand or some odd place, you can bring your own canvas bag for items bought from the places where you buy your food.

There are a lot of things you can to limit your carbon emissions but there are so many things that I may not even know about yet but I try to tell you about most anything I find out or have come across with each week and will post about it with a tip of the week.