Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

If you knew how much energy you were consuming each time you left a room and forgot to turn off the light, or turned your thermostat up a couple of degrees in the winter, would you be more conscious of your choices? Google hopes so. This week, Google unveiled a protoype of their new PowerMeter service, which will allow homeowners to measure their energy use in real time.

The prototype is an electricity measuring device that attaches to your home’s main circuit breaker; the information it collects gets sent back to Google’s servers and then emailed to you. Farther down the road, Google plans to add “social tools” which allow you to compare energy consumption among your neighbors and friends. Currently there are about 30 Google employees testing the PowerMeter in their homes, but the final product is still in development and not available to the public.

There are, however, other products currently on the market that help you determine the efficiency of each appliance in your house, such as the Kill-A-Watt, the Wattson,  and the PowerCost Monitor.

Are you interested in this technology, and would it change your habits? Could the Google PowerMeter make a significant impact on energy consumption in this country?

The folks at re-nest are offering their handy top ten ideas for recycling old sheets and towels. And don’t miss the five best non-toxic cleaners you probably already have in your home, starting with two great ways to clean up red wine spills.

Education news from Program Director Ross Danis:

In a unanimous opinion issued on November 18, 2009, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered a remand in the landmark Abbott v. Burke case in order to fully vet the constitutionality of the New Jersey Legislature’s new school funding formula, the School Funding Reform Act of 2008 (SFRA).

Before a special master, the State must prove that the SFRA provides sufficient resources to ensure a “thorough and efficient” education to the almost 300,000 schoolchildren in the 31 poor, urban districts in New Jersey. The Abbott schoolchildren are represented by the Education Law Center.

If you’re interested in following the trial, which started yesterday and is expected to last until February 28, Our Children/Our Schools, a statewide education justice campaign whose membership includes education, children’s advocacy and civil rights organizations, has created a blog to share information for the duration of the trial.

Here’s a lovely poster, yours to download and print for free from ReadyMade Magazine, who asked five artists to re-imagine posters from the Great Depression era.

“Eat Local, Buy Local, Grow Local” is by Christoper Silas Neal, who explained that “solving the world’s energy and food problems would do a great deal to strengthen the global economy, prevent disease, and reverse the effects of climate change. The original Victory Garden program was designed to ease pressure on the public agricultural supply and support the war effort by encouraging families to grow their own food. I wanted to expand this idea to the broader concept of buying and eating local food.”

Be sure to check out all five posters available for download.