4Offsets to Offer Carbon Offsets In-World for Second Life

One of the many advantages people highlight for virtual worlds is that they can reduce the need to travel for business or social functions, cutting down on carbon emissions and, hopefully, global warming. See, for example, Christian Renaud's story of his three-month attempt to do Cisco's business virtually. Plenty of others make the argument that the server farms and computers aren't much better than planes and cars, but 4Offsets is offering a catered solution for the green-minded virtual worlder: an in-world store [SLURL] tailored to offset the carbon footprint of a Second Life avatar as well as more general carbon offset programs for the real world. “Our goal at 4Offsets is to get the average citizen involved in the fight against global warming and supply them with offsets.  Second Life is a great venue to both spread the word and connect with forward thinking, creative people”,  4Offsets CEO Fred Weiss said in a statement. “Second Life is a great place for 4Offsets, because not only can we discuss Global Warming, we can actually allow participants to offset the CO2 emitted from their virtual footprint." The project is a partnership with Second Life-based Jorel Ventures.

Comments

[Troy McConaghy]

After the recent Life 2.0 Summit in Second Life, the organizers did a comparison of the carbon footprint between the virtual conference and a similar-size physical-world conference. The result: the virtual conference generated over 150 times less carbon. Reference: http://tinyurl.com/59h5l7