I’m sorry, this is going to be a rant, I’ll just tell you right now…. I’m kind of frustrated.

Phil Nail, was quoted in an article at Top Hosts as saying… “… and buying green credits doesn’t make your company green” Errrrr And, according to AISO’s website, many of the so-called green Web hosts out there don’t run any environmentally friendly technologies at all, but instead buy RECs as a marketing tactic in hopes of making you think they’re helping the environment…. I say, with friends like that, who needs enemies?

Well, I run a green web hosting service and we buy REC’s. I recycle religiously, I garden my own food, I buy local when I can’t get what I need or don’t have room to grow. I bicycle when I could drive, I buy sustainable organic and fair trade as much as is humanly possible. I accept all the bags of leaves and grass clippings I can get from all the neighbors in my town, and I do my best to research where the money from my green tags is going. What more could one want from a small company? Should I not BE a small business because I can’t afford a windmill of my own or the solar panels that should run a green hosting business. The individual that I buy my hosting from is a greenie too, the way he lives, etc… in the backwoods… How could we collectively be better role models? Last I checked, being poor didn’t make one bad, and being rich didn’t make one better. I mean, is THAT what this is all about… egads, big business?

While I would give my eye teeth to host all my thirty some sites and those of all my clients on truly solar/wind powered servers, AISO makes it cost prohibitive for me to do so. (they are over ten times more expensive as all my hosting expenses put together, including our green tags) there is an addon price for every service I need. As a reseller who hosts design clients, I have little choice but to buy energy credits to help make a difference. (Just like I use electricity in my home until I can come up with the fundage to install solar panels) Researching where that money is going can be a full time job, but it’s a step in the right direction. If Mr. Nail would create a program that is as affordable as it is green, we’d see a HUGE difference in the number of truly industrious and sincere site owners that wish to participate in sustainable technology.

As it is right now, I don’t think that saying, “… these so called green web hosts” and “… and buying green credits doesn’t make your company green” is helpful at all. Not to mention the fact that it is counterproductive. (and YES, buying green tags for home and office in addition to all other sustainability practices makes us GREEN) Those comments don’t take into consideration those very small and home based businesses that are making every attempt to be sustainable in their business practices doing everything they can from recycling at the office and at home, buying sustainable products to gardening their own food and/or buying local.

I agree with Michael Bloch’s (from ThinkHost) opinion of the situation much more…

“Around the world, there’s an awful lot of data center infrastructure already in place and while it would be nice to have solar panels and wind turbines directly powering each one of them, it’s horribly expensive at this point, somewhat wasteful of current infrastructure and is going to be some time coming.”

“The purchase of green tags is a great way for hosting providers to do something environmentally positive right now by ensuring the equivalent power that they use is fed into a grid somewhere from renewable sources such as solar and wind (these are the offsets we use). It’s a big picture concept and a practice that should be encouraged rather than being seen as the poor cousin to direct renewables powering.”

These things are all intertwined and they all must work synergistically as must we who are all, in our own spheres, striving to effectively promote public awareness. I can understand attacking those that are proven to only trying to ride an economical ‘green’ wave, but those sort of sweeping statements really leave out the conscientious small business, which in my humble opinion is the backbone of all larger ones. I don’t mind paying a bit more for sustainable technology, but not more than ten times more. Sorry, those condescending statements just really rubbed me the wrong way this morning. I’m going out to the garden and work off some of this steam…

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While it may not have been hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, recent triple-digit heat proved more than enough to get the job done when it came to baking cookies.

Justus-Tiawah teacher Sherri Ladd’s seventh and eighth grade classes participated in a day-long experiment, involving cookie dough, her personal car and mother nature.

“With it being so hot — into the hundreds — we thought we’d find out if it would be hot enough inside my car, with the windows rolled up, to actually bake cookies,” Ladd said. “So, last Friday, we put in two dozen cookies — just regular raw cookie dough — onto baking sheets, put them in my car (in the JT parking lot), rolled up the windows, and let the heat do the rest.”

Throughout the day, Ladd said the temperature in her car reached 200 degrees Fahrenheit (according to an oven thermometer placed inside, near the cookies), and by day’s end, her seventh-grade science students reaped the benefits of her scientific curiosity.

“My seventh grade girls were the lucky ones that day — they got to finish off the cookies,” she said, noting the students described them as “softer and fluffier” than cookies baked in a conventional oven.

Although temperatures have cooled somewhat since last week, Ladd said she wouldn’t rule out baking another few dozen cookies for her students, were it to warm up again.

“If we have another hot day like we did last week, we might bake more cookies inside my car,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

By: Tom Fink http://claremoredailyprogress.com

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