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This week the report Cloud Computing - The IT Solution for the 21st Century from the Carbon Disclosure Project has been making rounds in cloud computing circles. The report concludes that large businesses could use cloud computing to cut CO2 emissions by 85.7 million metric tons annually by 2020.

But GreenMonk analyst Tom Raftery says the report has some serious flaws, including the assumption that energy savings necessarily equate to reduced carbon emissions.

The term "deadhead" didn't always refer to a peace-loving, tree-hugging, hippie. In the transportation and shipping industry, "deadhead", actually referred to the inefficient waste of fuel that consisted of an empty jet or 18-wheeler making the return trip from its delivery.

Not only are deadheads bad for business, but they're bad for the environment, and technology is working to wipe deadheads out completely. New services, like Austin-based uShip, are working to match carriers and customers in ways that are good for the environment.

When we write about Internet of Things we explain the latest in futuristic "sense and share" devices for your clothes, homes and cars. Yet when it comes to modern mobile, we don't need to focus so much on what can be done in the future as much as what can be done right now. Our phones' ability to "sense and share" is well established. Explaining what your phone can currently do is an ideal way to explain what everyday objects will be able to do once they become Internet of Things objects.

At a recent Google summit on wireless sensors, Deborah Estin, director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at UCLA spoke of three simple ways our phones already work the way the future Internet of Things will work. Estin's presentation, Participatory Sensing: An Emerging Driver For The Multidimensional Internet, explains what we'll one day be able to do for not only our own health but for the health of the world we live in.

If you failed to notice Google's lovely new artwork this morning, today is Earth Day. The purpose of the day in recent years has been to reflect on our energy consumption and to raise awareness on how to better preserve our planet, and startups can play a significant role in that preservation. Seedcamp, arguably the largest and most influential incubator in Europe, is teaming up with IBM and other organizations to host SmartCamp, a series of networking events across the globe designed to uncover the hottest early-stage companies with an environmental focus.

Yesterday, during a meeting with a number of startups in Paris, we met up with the team behind the Green Watch project. Just like Google collects data from cell phones with GPS chips to aggregate real-time traffic information, this watch measures ozone levels and noise pollution. The watch connects wirelessly to the wearer's mobile phone and sends updates to Citypulse, an open platform for receiving and storing environmental data. The Green Watch is currently only a prototype and not available for sale.

YouTube announced today that in conjunction with CNN the site is now offering an opportunity for users to submit and vote on questions for world leaders to be asked at next week's UN Climate Change Conference.

It's the first use of the Digg-like Google Moderator on YouTube and the whole endeavor looks a lot like the Digg Dialogue series with leaders and celebrities. Can events like this draw a significant crowd to hear about the issues? How do crowd-voted questions stack up against questions thought up by expert journalists? Can anything YouTube and CNN do prevent the tides from rising so far that these become academic questions in short order? Stay tuned to find out.

It's always amazing to see the lengths people will go to get a photograph of a cheetah, lion or African hunting dog. For some, it never occurs to them that as they stumble out of their car to adjust tripods and flashes, a rare predator is quietly considering eating them. In the circle of life there are many players and while there's no shortage of people, there are unfortunately thousands of endangered animals and plants. Biologists have been looking for ways to determine the most important species based on the number of feeding-related interactions, and surprisingly the Google search algorithm is playing a part.

In January 2009, only 41% of US voters believed that global warming was caused by fossil fuel emissions and other man-made causes. According to a recent Rasmussen national report, the majority of those surveyed over the phone believed that global warming was part of a natural planetary trend that will reverse itself over time. In a panic to sway public perception and environmental decision making, the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat recently teamed up with Google to create a Greenhouse Gas Map detailing man's environmental pollution. The map is a color-coded Google Maps mash up that pulls national greenhouse gas inventory and Kyoto Protocol data to display toxic emissions in industrialized nations. The tool was created in anticipation of the UN's Climate Change Conference to be held at the end of this year.

If you're the kind of person who cares about the companies with whom you do business - who owns them and what impact they have on the world - Scryve is worth checking out.

This startup was created as a research and vetting tool for determining the environmental and social responsibility of a wide range of companies. Their data comes from consumers, researchers, and KLD, a corporate social responsibility firm, as well. Scryve allows users to contribute to ratings and suggests alternative companies with better scores.

Tim O'Reilly spoke tonight at ETech in San Jose, on a theme he has been talking about for the past 6 months or so: working on things that matter in the web world. In this talk though he went into a lot of actual examples, as well as strategies people can deploy to work on meaningful things.

O'Reilly began by saying that we're in a bubble - but not an investment one, a reality bubble. The financial crisis was top of his list, but he also referred to health, climate and so on. However, he said that working on stuff that matters doesn't necessarily mean working on non-profits or social ventures. He said that the world's great challenges are also the world's greatest opportunities.