Yahoo! goes green(er)

More climate-change initiatives from the original web geeks

Posted by David Roberts at 9:49 AM on 14 May 2007

Read more about: climate | business | greening biz operations | websites | green living

A few weeks ago I noted that Yahoo! has pledged to go carbon neutral in 2007. Today the company is making some more splashy green announcements.

Company co-founder David Filo, along with Global Green and Matt Dillon (?!), will be taking to Times Square later today to announce a series of initiatives around climate change. You can read about the details in this blog post from Filo.

The main push is around "Be a Better Planet," a site that will serve as the center of a contest to determine America's greenest city. As part of the announcement, Yahoo! is donating 10 hybrid taxis to New York City. The winner of the greenest city contest will also receive a fleet of hybrid taxis (or the cash equivalent to devote to going greener). If you join the effort and take the green pledge, Yahoo! will send you a free CFL.

The other big debut is Yahoo! Green, a site that will serve as a hub for green news and tips. Says Filo:

In a matter of a week or so, the site will also be full of green news headlines; featured content from Global Green USA, Environmental Defense, NRDC and Lime; blog feeds from environmental authority Amory Lovins, Environmental Defense's chief scientist Bill Chameides and EcoGeek; green shopping tips; the 18Seconds.org site; and relevant content from Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups, and the Yahoo! Autos Green Center. And it'll evolve from there with even more content and features, all in the name of informing and empowering you to be as green as you can be. The site was designed and built by our Yahoo! For Good Scrum team, an internal sabbatical program for employees who want to use their talents to do some good for the world.

(Where is Grist in there, you're wondering. Good question!)

As TechCrunch notes, this is the latest in an escalating battle with Google to see who's greener. I've always thought that the real heroes of the environment in the coming few decades won't be activists or gov't officials but entrepreneurs from the tech biz. In that crowd, green has become a status symbol, and when you combine the quest for status, lots of money, and creative young people ... things happen quickly. Best case scenario, green innovation gets on the same exponential upward curve that internet tech innovation has been on for the last 20 years. Here's hoping for a green Moore's Law.

I hope to talk to Filo in more depth soon. Keep an eye out for it.

For story: Yahoo! goes green(er)
3 Comments | Post a Comment

As negative as this may sound,

competition holds the key to many of our problems. Get people competing to make something, like, ah, an Encyclopedia of Life and you will get an optimized product. Turn it over to a bureaucracy and you will get crap. If solar panels finally cross the cost/technological barrier, as batteries are finally doing, you will see panel envy everywhere. We may see electric bike envy coming along in the next few years and God knows what else.

However, competition between cities may not work. Competition between governments may just turn into who can pass the most regulations and provide the most subsidies (the good and bad nullifying each other).

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 10:32 AM on 14 May 2007

I agree with David

that technology will be the next wave of green. Not just for cultural reasons in the technology crowd, but also because technological industries have so much to gain by going green. For example--transitioning information exchange from paper to online is a great way to save energy (and trees). I wrote a response to this on my blog...

by lisavark at 10:39 AM on 14 May 2007

Go competition!

I agree with biodiversivist that competition is vital. Particularly between two companies like Yahoo! and Google, who are fighting for the same thing (although some people - myself included - have accounts with both).

On the other hand,

"The winner of the greenest city contest will also receive a fleet of hybrid taxis".

.
Interesting, but shouldn't they give the hybrids to the least green city? Just a thought.

If I share initials with 'Global Warming', is that a sign?

by tico89 at 5:26 PM on 15 May 2007

ADVERTISING POLICY

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