Part I: a cleaner, safer Earth

Nov 28, 2007 11:51 GMT  ·  By

Pollution is a major cause of stress for the general populace and, at the same time, a source of public image enhancement on the part of the activists striving for its abolition or as-much-as-possible diminishing. The only thing that is now different comparing to the last century is that a number of companies have taken it upon themselves to turn the tide and get the things rolling.

What's most interesting is that it's not the mammoths causing the pollution the ones to try to cut it down, but rather the ones that have nothing or very little to do with it, like Google. The only way I see the Mountain View based company polluting is the fumes from the cars its employees drive or the heat generated by the hard drives that they have gathered their databases on. Apart from that? nothing. If I'm wrong feel free to contradict me and give examples.

Google Inc. and Google.Org have decided to put it between themselves to try to solve this problem, as their leaders held a conference call to discuss the launch of a major renewable energy initiative. It took place yesterday and no specific details of the talks have been disclosed to the press. The participants were Larry Page, Co-founder and President of Products at Google Inc., Larry Brilliant, Executive Director at Google.Org and Bill Weihl, the Green Energy Czar at Google Inc.

Businesswire.com has more insight on the matter: "Google today announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The newly created initiative, known as Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies. Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work."

"If we meet this goal," said [Google co-founder Larry Page], "and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well."