Welcome back for another edition of green news of the week featuring a few interesting stories impacting the environment across the globe. This weeks’ highlights: Google’s energy impact, Al Gore’s Climate Crisis Reality Project, Empire State Building retrofits earn LEED-Gold certification, Tokelau Pacific islands execute sustainable solutions with solar and coconut renewable energy alternatives, CDP reports on large corporation low carbon progress, and how wind turbines work. Click on the link to read the full article.

The Story Behind Google’s Huge Appetite for Energy. Believe it or not, Google does a lot to offset their significant energy consumption. Gmail is apparently 80 times less carbon-intensive than other email services, because of the efficiencies at Google’s data centers. According to the big picture definition at Google Green: “At Google, we’ve worked hard to minimize the environmental impact of our services. In fact, to provide you with Google products for a month, our servers use less energy per user than leaving a light on for 3 hours. If you add in our renewable energy and offsets, our footprint is zero. And we continue to find new ways to reduce our impact even further.”

Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. “24 Presenters. 24 Time Zones. 13 Languages. 1 Message. 24 Hours of Reality is a worldwide event to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis. It will consist of a new multimedia presentation created by Al Gore and delivered once per hour for 24 hours, representing every time zone around the globe. Each hour people living with the reality of climate change will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events — including floods, droughts and storms — and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate. We will offer a round-the-clock, round-the-globe snapshot of the climate crisis in real time. The deniers may have millions of dollars to spend, but we have a powerful advantage. We have reality.” Starts at 8pm EST on September 14, 2011 and continuing for 24 hours – you can watch it online here.

Empire State Building’s Green Transformation Earns LEED-Gold. Built 80 years ago, the legendary Empire State Building has implemented a green retrofit and refurbishing earning them LEED-Gold certification on Tuesday from the U.S. Green Building council. They expect to reduce energy costs by $4.4 million annually and cut carbon emissions by 105,000 metric tons over the next 15 years.

Pacific Islands to be Powered 100% by Coconuts, Sun. The tiny South Pacific islands of Tokelau are scheduled to become 100% sustainably powered with renewable energy. 93% of the island’s energy requirements will be derived from solar powered installations and the balance will come from something they have in abundance, coconut oil from coconuts. Experts estimate that 600 meters of solar panels in combination with a few hundred coconuts will supply sufficient clean energy to power the island.

CDP Global 500 Report 2011. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) endeavoured to collect information from the Global 500 companies, requesting that they measure and report what climate change means for their business. With the mission of ‘accelerating low carbon growth’, the results are revealing with over 74% of the Global 500 committing to emission reduction targets.

What is a Wind Turbine and How Does it Work? This article does a great job of explaining wind turbines and how they work. The kinetic power of the wind provides a clean, renewable energy alternative to fossil fuels.

Check in next week for more green news stories from around the world.
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