Photo credit: Brave New Films

The well-known Oscar and Emmy-winning director Michael Moore says goodbye to GM today as the failed auto company files for bankruptcy. Moore says the “big three” auto companies in the USA are responsible for their own demise and that they have created “some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming”.

“We are now in a different kind of war — a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.”

But Moore says he feel “joy” about the fact that the American people now owns 60% of GM and that he is confident “we can do a better job”. He is also calling for a swift transformation of GM into a modern and environmentally-friendly company that produces cars for the future, and that the old GM factories start to produce windmills and solar panels. In short Moore is suggesting the following:

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Tangent, who mainly provides computer solutions to education, government, corporate, and healthcare markets, have announced Evergreen 17, a “green” and “ultra power efficient” touch screen PC.

According to Tangent the Evergreen 17 only consumes 24 watts, which is 72% less than the Energy Star 4.0 rating requires.

“Not only do users experience computing with a touch screen LCD in a space-saving form factor, they also get industry leading power efficiency at 24 watts and 72% less energy usage than Energy Star 4.0 limits,” said Douglas Monsour, Tangent’s President. “This translates into cost-savings while, at the same time, helping the environment.”

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Today PC World unveiled, via its Advent brand, a new eco-friendly computer called Advent Eco PC.

The Advent Eco PC is made from 75% recycled plastics, comes with electronic manuals, uses 25 watts when idling and is said to save you £35 (about $65) a year on energy. The computers specs are surely enough for the average computer user: 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo T5250 CPU, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 802.11b/g, and Vista Home Premium.

But, the Advent Eco PC is almost one year late, it should have been released last Christmas. And this is a disadvantage for the computer. The design and specs are not as “mind-blowing” as they are on Dell’s new eco-friendly computer. To be fair, the computer looks like an ugly wifi router, and it’s a bit more expensive than similar green computers.

But if you want to have an eco-friendly computer that will save you money on your energy bill the Advent Eco PC is a good option for you to consider. The Advent Eco PC starts at £599.99 (about $1100).

Here is a neat little green computer called DecTop. The computer runs on only 8 watts. Yes, you heard right and yes, 8 watts is nothing! You can compare that with my CPU processor who needs around 45 watts to work.

But of course this low power drain has some downsides. DecTop comes with 128MB memory, a 10GB harddrive and a 366 MHz processor. Not much to brag about. But if you are only browsing, checking your emails or RSS feeds and doing some small amount of writing this computer is enough for you.

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Lenovo recently released the ThinkCentre A61e, a brand new green computer. The ThinkCentre A61e uses few hazardous materials, consumes little power and is easy to recycle. Because of that it has received the desirable EPEAT Gold status.

Peter Schrady with the really long title of vice president and general manager, Emerging Products Business Unit says that “the importance of maximizing energy efficiency and being environmentally conscious is touching all aspects of our daily lives, from the light bulbs we use to light our homes to the hybrid cars we drive to the green technology we rely on to run our businesses.”

Un-customized it uses an AMD Sempron LE 1150 processor, 512MB ATI Radeon X1200, 512MB Memory, 80GB hard drive and costs $399. Not too shabby. Sure the computer is ugly (or shall we say retro?) but it’s still one of the more high performing green computers out there.

According to Lenovo using the energy-efficient AMD Athlon X2 dual core and AMD Sempron single core processors can help save up to 50 percent in energy costs annually.

Another good thing is that Lenovo ranks high in the Green Electronics Guide from Greenpeace. They are currently on the 4th place being beaten only by Dell (on third place).

Press Release: Lenovo Raises Energy-Efficiency Bar with Its Smallest, Quietest Desktop PC

Yesterday I talked about how you can fight global warming by buying a laptop due to the fact that they generally use less energy than an ordinary desktop computer.

But it doesn’t really matter if you use a laptop or a desktop computer if you don’t activate the computers power saving settings. And don’t think for a second that your computers screen saver saves energy. Unless the screen or backlight on a laptop or desktop screen actually turns off, a screen saver uses as much power as word processing.

So the best way to save energy is to activate your computers power saving features. Activate your computers sleep mode so that your computer goes to “sleep” while you are (afk) away from keyboard. But don’t worry! Activating the sleep mode doesn’t mean that the computer shuts itself off while you’re not around. All the work and things you were doing before will still be there when you return.

You can also choose to switch off your monitor or spin down the hard drives after a certain amount of time away from your computer. Your power settings also allow you to completely shutdown your computer if you haven’t used it for a while.

But doing all this can be tricky if you aren’t an experienced computer user. So the easiest way is to use a program called LocalCooling. It’s a neat program where it’s only downsides are that it only works on Windows computers.

LocalCooling let’s you easily decide what kind of power saving mode you want to use on your computer and it shows you how much energy your computer uses. The best part is that it shows how many trees, gallons of oil or electricity you have saved when having these power saving settings on. It’s really neat!

If you want you are welcome to join Green-Blogs very own LocalCooling group. This is how you do:

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The Kanguru Eco Drive

I have posted about the new tower server Primergy TX120 from Fujitsu Siemens Computers that is said to be the world’s most energy efficient server. Not everyone can afford to buy a server, so here is something for us more ordinary bloggers.

Western Digital, one of the most well known hard drive companies, has teamed up with Kanguru in marketing a green hard drive for consumers and businesses. These GreenPower Hard Drives are all internal drives which are available in capacities from 320GB and up to 1TB (1000 GB).

Western Digital claims that these new GreenPower Hard Drives is saving up to 40% in power consumption. Western Digital says they accomplish this through several technologies such as balancing spin speed, transfer rate and cache size; automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag and calculating optimum seek speeds.

These new GreenPower Hard Drives goal is to be “Energy Star 4.0” compliant. That means a minimizing their carbon footprint while realizing savings in electricity costs.

According to Western Digital data-centres that use “10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons”.

Also, don’t forget to check out Kangurus eco-friendly hard drives. These eco-friendly hard drives have three power modes that allow you to save up to 75% on the energy usage. The drives are fully RoHS compliant (no hazardous substances).

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/greenpower.asp
http://www.kanguru.com/35ecohd.html