Google & Yahoo! Go Green!

It's not often we think about online companies contributing excesses of greenhouse gas emissions or pollutants - more often big mining organizations, logging companies and factories are held responsible for the overall desecration of our environment! However, Google and Yahoo!, forever the fierce competitors, are now battling over who has the greater social conscience - who is going 'greenest'?Michael Arrington covers this topic over at TechCrunch and I've touched on his points below.

• Installation of 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels, at the Mountain View campus, in California. Google "will be the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S., and we think it's one of the largest on any corporate site in the world...The amount of electricity that will be generated is equivalent to powering about 1,000 average California homes...offsetting approximately 30% of our peak electricity consumption at those buildings."

• The Google Blog has been a megaphone to raise awareness of the effects of carbon emissions. Along the same vein, an internal Google memo, leaked late last year and titled "Big Goals and Directions - 2006" stated that Google would like to gain carbon neutrality by building 10 megawatt of green power.

• Google launch "Summer of Green" website to promote 'green' travel!

Yahoo!

• Yahoo! are going 'carbon neutral', doing their part to combat climate change, and they're intent on educating you about what changes this will mean for their company, and how you too can take part!
  
• Yesterday, Yahoo! joined forces with Hollywood actor Matt Dillon and Global Green USA to issue the "Greenest City In America" challenge. The introduction of another new site ""Be a Better Planet", [is] a program that empowers Americans to take action against climate change". The winning city gets an entire fleet of hybrid taxis (or the cash equivalent dedicated towards city greening projects), and Yahoo! kick starts the program by donating a fleet of hybrid taxis to New York.
  
  I started writing this article determined to uncover the darker motives Google and Yahoo! could have for 'greening' themselves up, and have decided to stifle my skepticism and accept their efforts - even join them! The competition between Google and Yahoo! in this case seems well worth the effort - let us hope they continue trying to outdo each other on the environmental front!