A couple of days ago I wrote a short entry about Ottawa’s anti-idling by-law that’s now being enforced. According to a story by the CBC, OC Transpo has an anti-idling policy that’s stricter than the by-law in that it requires drivers to shut off their engines if it’s warmer than -5 C out. A reporter went to a transit station on a day when it was 7 C and observed 15 buses, of which 13 sat empty with their engines running for an average of 9 minutes, which violates OC Transpo’s policy. Apparently, there are ramifications for drivers who don’t respect the policy, though OC Transpo did not specify what they were in the story. Hopefully, the media coverage will be enough to pressure OC Transpo to enforce their policy more rigourously because this is both bad for the environment and wasteful of our money.

Kudos to the 2 drivers who did respect the policy — you set a good example for the others.

One of the recently released widget plugins for WordPress lead me to a site called CO2Stats.com. Basically, you get a little scrap of code to insert into your blog (or any other type of website for that matter). When people visit your site, they cause a contribution to be made to renewable energy projects that help offset the CO2 they estimate running your blog causes to be emitted. The people at CO2Stats did some calculations and determined that the global average rate of carbon emissions due to the electricity consumption of a single personal computer interacting with a server is 17 mg of CO2/second. That is then used in a calculation involving the number and duration of visits to a website to calculate the total emissions for a site. The offsets are funded by advertising sponsors who are committed to making the Internet a little more environmentally friendly.

An entry in the Boston Herald Green World blog has an interview with the people behind CO2Stats.