Honda have launched a new initiative at MyEarthDream.com.

The basic gist is that their F1 competition car will carry the minimum badging required, and allows you to pledge to do one small thing to reduce your emissions. Once you pledge, your name gets added to the car.

Seems to me to be an odd step to be touting environmental issues on a high performance F1 car. But the F1 competition has been making some interesting moves, planning to go hybrid this year.

What do you think about the initiative?

Update: Green Options gives it the thumbs down.

Update 2: Just found this teaser/trailer video on YouTube.

Here’s one for the graphic designers amongst us.

Following on from the thought experiment of a black Google home page, EcoIron have come up with the Low Wattage Palette - a set of colours that take less energy to display on CRT monitors. Mark claims that the “palette uses only about 3 or 4 watts more than a completely black screen”.

Interesting…

TreeHugger makes the interesting point that taxis “drive an average of 10 times more than regular passenger cars” and “Switching cabs to hybrids will save cab drivers an average of $1,200 to $1,500 per month on fuel”.

These are U.S. stats - but it makes complete sense, though sometimes I need someone else to make the connection for me

What this means is that the additional cost of a hybrid could fairly easily be recouped by a taxi driver/company if they change their cars over. Big improvement on the $$ and environmental bottom-line.

Two added bonuses I can think of - 1) cabs often spend a lot of time in traffic/idle, which is where hybrids shine from a fuel-economy perspective; and 2) the electric engine makes them zippy from a standing stop, which is great for city driving.

Sydney is already trialing hybrid cabs - and I seem to recall a commercial venture kicking off, though I can’t seem to find the link (anyone?). Let’s hope it’s not too long before the idea catches on…

I’ve just finished watching the “Your Home” DVD that I mentioned last week.

The video is split into a number of sections - an intro to sustainable design, interviews, case studies and other materials.

Having read the last two Sanctuary magazines, and being an avid reader of ReNew and a bunch of sustainability-focused blogs, I found the intro section a bit light on - yet it didn’t seem to have enough detail for someone just starting to get their head around the issues of sustainable design to really get an idea of what the basic principles are - lots of simple statements about complex issues like thermal mass and orientation.

The case studies were also a bit disappointing - basically text screens with very limited graphics and no video, which was a real lost opportunity in my view because I would have loved to have seen video footage of the various features talked about in the text.

The winning section, to my mind, is the interviews section which went a long way to doing what I expected the case studies to do. They were very insightful - and a real inspiration. Got me thinking again about what I can do with my apartment!

Overall, I’d recommend the DVD for someone who is interested in sustainable design principles - but I’d also recommend reading Sanctuary as a companion to get a bit more detail about the issues covered in the DVD.

But of course, that’s just my opinion… Has anyone else seen the DVD? What did you think?