AMEE

A few weeks ago, my daughter came home quite distraught from school.  “Daddy, the polar bears and penguins are dying and it is our fault” she declared at the dinner table.  Having spent many hours admiring the polar bears and penguins at the Central Park Zoo, this was something that all three of our kids immediately agreed was to be stopped.  So they wanted to know what could be done about it.  We had one of the better dinner discussions in a long time and produced a list of things we would do personally, such as making sure we all turned off the lights in rooms that we were not in.  Now every time I see a light on all I have to say is “Polar …” and they run to turn it off.

I believe that we have now reached a stage where many individuals and businesses around the world want to do the same thing.  They want to make choices that take the environmental impact of their actions in to account with a particular focus on carbon footprint.  But that turns out to be a difficult problem because the measurement of emissions is hard.  On the Union Square Ventures blog, we have a post today explaining why emission measurement is a hard problem and what a startup called AMEE is doing about it.  We are excited to be investing in AMEE which will power many consumer and business services that enable the kind of informed decision making that is required if we want to save the polar bears, penguins and ourselves.