It seems like now more than ever, the news we hear about our climate is. . . not great. Earthday.org lists “deadly heat waves, extreme weather events, and threats to life on earth” along with “Global sea levels are rising. . . Surface temperatures are setting new heat records. . .glaciers are in retreat globally. . .” in the long list of negative effects on our Earth due to human activity.

As individuals, there is only so much we can do ourselves to halt the rising temperatures on Earth. It’s nice to see large corporations, like LEGO, step up to the challenge. According to energymanagertoday.com, the LEGO Group is using a combination of wind and solar energies to power their entire manufacturing facilities. On top of that, energymanagertoday.com notes that LEGO is even three years ahead of schedule. With global temperatures on the rise, it seems like every second counts. If more corporations would follow suit with where they get their energy, maybe the planet would be a better place.

Climate Change

LEGO Achieves its Goal of 100% Renewable Energy Use 3 Years Ahead of Schedule

Ecosia.org is a relatively new search engine that “like Google, but very different: we use our ad revenue to plant trees where nature and people need them most.” Ecosia finds places in the world where the ecosystem depends on and needs trees to survive and thrive, and uses their profits to lift those environments up. Concerned about climate change? One of the major side effects to the rising climate is that it prevents biodiversity, according to sciencing.com. This is one way that each small action helps. I couldn’t even keep track of how often I use google–it’s embedded into my life. Luckily, Ecosia fits into my life pretty easily, it’s an easy-to-add-on Chrome extension with a similar user experience and format to Google. Using Ecosia is a very low effort way to help the environment.

Ecosia also sets a good example among other search engines, social media, or otherwise software related corporations. Ecosia releases their financial activities each month, along with receipts that show that they’ve planted the trees they’ve promised. And so far it seems to be going successfully, since there are “over 67 million trees planted” according to info.ecosia.org. Ecosia also respects privacy of its users. Both their main webpage and the information page make it clear that Ecosia’s profits are not gained from selling data to companies.

All in all, I think Ecosia has taken many of the public’s least-liked aspects of search engines and improved upon them. The CO2 positive tree planting is just an awesome bonus.

Reference: ecosia.org

info.ecosia.org

https://sciencing.com/climate-change-affect-biodiversity-23158.html