In today’s program, Andrew Zolli, announced the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative. This initiative is the second iteration of our commitment to being “carbon negative”. This is not your parent’s carbon neutrality. The idea of being carbon negative means that you are offsetting in excess of your carbon emissions.

Representatives of each benefiting project in Pop!Tech’s listings are participating in this year’s Pop!Tech conference as “Pop!Tech Carbon Fellows.” Fellows include:

* Robert Freling, the Executive Director of The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), an organization dedicated to helping rural communities in the developing world power a brighter future through innovative uses of solar energy. SELF is bringing solar powered irrigation to Benin’s Kalale District in West Africa where over 80% of the villages do not have a source of surface water. The villages are provided with a source of clean renewable energy, eliminating the need for diesel & gas powered pumps.

* Dr. Sarah Otterstrom, the Executive Director of Paso Pacífico, a non-profit organization seeking to build wildlife corridors along the Pacific slope of Central America by supporting private landowners and small-scale farmers in sustainable land use and conservation activities. She is currently working on the restoration and conservation of endangered forest ecosystems in the Rivas Province of Nicaragua. This project also reduces the vulnerability of local communities to extreme climate events while improving ecosystem services and the viability of endangered species.

* Stefano Merlin, the Director of Ecologica Network and President of Instituto Ecologica, which coordinates several socio-environmental programs including the Bandeira Switching Non-Renewable Biomass Project in the North of Brazil. This project addresses the problem of deforestation and reduces the quantity of biomass decaying which, in turn, cuts down on green house gas emissions.

When you visit the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative website, you can input some information to get your annual carbon footprint. The average American’s carbon footprint is 9.44 tons of CO2. Mine was 14 tons and to offset that amount towards Paso Pacifico would work out to be only about $77 dollars)

How do you compare to that average?

Also, Mark Anderson of Wired Magazine just wrote a story about the program as a part of Wired coverage of the event.

Katie Fehrenbacher, who has been writing for the popular tech site GigaOm, has launched a new blog called Earth2Tech. The brand new site, which launched this week, is unique in that it can be broken up into three parts:

1. Clean Tech startup news coverage
2. Reviews of eco-initiatives from Big Business
3. Resource page for eco-entrepreneurs

This looks like a promising site and is already filled with some great posts about things like “The World’s Most Important Mushroom”…well, really, you are probably sold by now.

Thanks to Fast Company writer, Linda Tischler, who did a great little write up about the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts on their blog.

You can see it here.

Linda calls attention to the fact that it is becoming increasingly harder to score tickets to the conference and, rest assured, Pop!Tech will continue to make the content as widely available as possible to keep the conversation open to everyone. Our favorite quote from the Fast Company blog post:

“Can PopTech! scalpers be far behind?”

Imagining seedy scalpers prowling the charming streets of Camden whispering “you need two tickets?…I got two tickets…” — it tickles me.

Sky writing is sooooo 20th Century.

Congrats to KFC for being the first brand to be visible from outer space. The logo, recently revamped, is 87,500 square feet. Made of painted tile pieces, the project took 24 days to complete.

You can also watch a video of the project in action.
Note: There is an ongoing debate as to whether KFC is really the first brand to be seen from outer space. Target has also been visible using Google Earth.

So, it appears that Google Earth is the new advertising medium. And maybe this is what we can expect next…

via Michael Castellon