In the center of New York City, near Penn Station, a 70-foot billboard with a digital display is tracking the trillions of tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This should make your eyes open wide. It’s a huge number, and it’s getting bigger, fast. As Scientific American wrote the day the counter was unveiled, “Can you say guilt trip?”

Deutsche Bank partnered with MIT scientists to create this display– the world’s first real-time carbon counter. Its intent is to help create sense of urgency about greenhouse gas emissions, much like the National Debt Clock did a few years ago. This counter takes into account carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and a handful of other greenhouse gases, and reports them in “CO2 equivalents.”

As Newsweek summarized, “National debt used to be the big number we all lived in fear of. Now it’s greenhouse gases.”

We don’t like perpetuating fear and guilt when we talk about climate change, so we hope you look at this carbon counter, feel shocked, then take control and do some simple actions to reduce emissions. And if it makes you feel any better, the carbon counter’s display itself is made of low-energy LEDs to save– you guessed it– greenhouse gas emissions.

-Carolyn

We’ve now chugged through two weeks of public testing of the next-generation Brighter Planet site. Between the ample feedback provided by our hearty beta testers and the tireless effort Seamus, Rich, Adam, and Andy have put into adding features and tweaking code, the site’s come a long way over this stretch. Our to-dos and wish-list items remain awesomely large in number, but we’re moving along at a pretty good clip.

Now, I’ve marinated myself in pop culture for a very, very long time. Thinking about our progress brings to mind the opening sequence of 1970s sci-fi series The Six Million Dollar Man. But of course, no?

What? You’ve never seen this paragon of Bad TV? Well, the idea is that astronaut Steve Austin (played by Lee Majors, a beefy actor whose range included about three barely discernible facial expressions) is gravely injured when his experimental jet crashes. A cabal of government scientists and intelligence agents then intervenes, and, as a voice heard over the opening credits explains,

"Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better… stronger… faster."

Dumb show, really. But as a kid I loved the idea of a "rebuilt" bod imbued with special powers. The Bionic Man could throw a football about 500 yards, run 60 miles an hour, had X-ray vision; he stopped bad guys and regularly saved the world from horrible destruction.

And as embarrassing as it is to reveal how TV-addled a childhood I had, the superhero theme isn’t all that out of place here. We really do want to give people the means to take hold of their personal piece of our collective destiny and effect meaningful change. We want you to feel your own power to be part of solving global warming. We want our web application to take you to a place where you’ll be thinking, "Al-right! Bring on the cape and costume! I’m ready!!"

The bug-fixing phase of software development can be a real slog. It’s good — both for us here in the shop and for you the end user — to remember where we’re going. Kick butt, or bust.

So here’s what we’ve done to date:

» Better: Bit by bit, we’re making the experience of interacting with the site smoother, slicker, and more intuitive. Your feedback has been a huge help in identifying and fixing a long list of small things that were broken, confusing, or just not quite… right.

» Stronger: You asked for more control over what to reveal about yourself on your Brighter Planet public profile — done! And you hollered when the footprint calculator produced numbers that just didn’t add up. Yipe!! Not good. Nothing’s more important to us than your confidence in the integrity and accuracy of our emissions estimates. An intense hunt for the source of such weirdness ensued. We’ve already fixed a bucketload of issues relating to footprint accuracy, and will continue to pore over the data and calculations until we’re certain our estimates are as accurate as possible.

» Faster: We sped up the site. Pages should load faster now. We’re not done yet, though — by the time we’re done, it’ll be Steve Austin–fast, pinky swear.

- Ian Wilker, community manager, Brighter Planet

It has been an exciting first week with the Brighter Planet team. I
unpacked my bags, met most everyone in the office, and jumped right into
video production. I see my role here as a vessel of communication
between Brighter Planet headquarters and our growing extended family.

I grew up at a summer camp on an island in Maine. We paddled wood
canvas canoes around nearby lakes and rivers and further north through
Canada. It was one of those places where the pine trees seemed to
stretch on forever.

But I learned as I grew that those endless trees are second growth and
that they do end. There was a time when the rolling hills around the
camp were cut bare for their bark for the tanning industry. There was a
time when the island camp was not an island, not until a dam was built
to raise the lake to float the trees. This was shocking to learn as a
boy. What I saw when I looked around was nature, perfect, undisturbed.

On the one hand I was right. That was my nature, and what a beautiful
playground to grow up in. On the other hand there was so much more I
had to learn.

Everywhere there is a very real tension between the ways that people use
the land. Whether it be foresters, farmers, folks on vacation, land
trusts, local guides, hydro power, or campers like me, everyone shares
the space and fights to preserve what makes it precious.

In the great conversation taking place about the future of our
environment and our role in that future I would like to be one more
voice shouting, “Look how precious!”

-Daniel

On a day when our focus was turned to the House of Representatives and its historic vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, we couldn’t help but be distracted by the loss of the late-great Michael Jackson.

We made this video as a tribute to the King of Pop, and to his message: “If you want to make the world, a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change.”

-the Brighter Planet team

Over the last year, we’ve witnesses a vigorous political debate around federal climate legislation. Last month, Congressmen Waxmen and Markey brought their bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, (ACES), out of committee. The bill is scheduled for a house vote this Friday.

The ACES bill seeks to fundamentally transform America’s energy economy in two ways:
1. By instituting a carbon cap and trade system
2. By creating federal renewable energy and energy efficiency standards.

The bill’s greatest achievement would be finally placing a price on carbon. A price on carbon would make burning fossil fuels for electricity, transportation, or any other use more expensive, so cleaner sources of energy would be more competitive in the marketplace. Doing this would create, hundreds of thousands of green jobs, helping to lift our country out of the current economic crisis.

Without a doubt, this is a complex bill. Its sheer length (at 1200 pages) is daunting. It is filled with its share of compromises and disappointments. At Brighter Planet, we are particularly concerned by the number of allowances being allocated to the fossil fuel industry, the regulation of the carbon offset market being overseen by the US Department of Agriculture, and the weak short-term emission reduction targets.

Nonetheless, we support this bill, as do our partners at Ceres and 1Sky, as well as hundreds of small and large businesses, labor unions, and environmental non-profits. This bill cannot pass without the vocal support of a broad swath of Americans.

So, today, we’d like to take the unusual step of encouraging you to touch base with your congressional representative and urge him or her to vote for the Clean Energy and Security Act this Friday.

You can reach your representative by calling, 877-9-REPOWER.

Thank you,

-Robbie