FAQ

Good question!

Basically, renewable energy credits (or what we call 'CO₂ reductions' sometimes for simplicity) are certificates that prove that electricity produced by traditional (potentially harmful) means were replaced by equal amounts of energy produced by green methods.

For more detailed information, visit our supplier's FAQ site.

Good question! We find companies to sponsor the initiative every month. Of course, the more users we have the easier it will be to find good sponsors, so invite your friends :) If you are interested in sponsoring, please contact us.

In the future, we will be offering a way for people to personally buy more CO₂ emission reductions for their facebook and computer use.

Right now, you can only earn CO₂ reductions through nightly updates and by posting green ideas that get thumbs ups from users. We are working on introducing new ways to do this, including a game. Keep checking back!

You can also contact us, if you have any ideas that you think we should consider!

First of all, we don't encourage you to spend any more time on your computer than you normally would. Our application is meant to be a mean for you to do something worthwhile for the environment, while you're doing things that you would normally do anyway (eg: using your computer to study, work or keep in touch with your friends using Facebook).

What it comes down to is simply a matter of proportions. To take an extreme example, if you had to turn on your computer to log on to Facebook for 1 minute and a sponsor would pay $10 billion to environmental causes to sponsor that single page view, I think we could happily say that the environment benefited from your computer use. On the other hand, if you had to have a million people leave their computers on for 20 years to generate $1 towards environmental causes, that would probably end up doing more harm to the planet than any help! It's all a matter of degrees, and we can safely say that if you do the math on the marginal time that people spend on Greenbook versus the thousands of dollars Greenbook generates solely for the environment, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

We are certified by a real company. You can obtain detailed info about our supplier on our website. You could also call them and check if you're that sort of folk. In addition we have put up all our past and present purchase certificates.

Every month, the exact quantity of supply varies depending on how much money the sponsor is willing to give us. By installing this application and helping it grow, you are directly helping us purchase higher quantities of CO₂ reductions (the sponsor gives us higher amounts of money for higher exposure, obviously). On our purchases page, we also mention the exact amount of CO₂ reductions we purchased each month.

In addition to sponsor mentions, we also have one ad banner. Ads on the application website currently help pay for our awesome webhost Slicehost and a few other fees here and there. Keeping these ads on our website makes sure we focus our sponsorship revenues towards the purchase of CO₂ reduction.

Keep in mind though that our ads will always be restricted to our app website. We will NEVER advertise on your profile (it's against Facebook's rules)

Each day we'll have a daily amount of CO₂ removal to give out, just like the regular nightly updates. You'll receive the percentage from that daily amount based on the percentage of thumbs your ideas got that day.

The more thumbs up your idea gets each day, the more CO₂ removal you'll get!. And you'll always be getting more every day your idea gets even one thumbs up! So make sure you share your ideas with all your friends, even those who haven't added the application yet.

We use an algorithm that looks at a lot of different aspects, such as the total number of thumbs, thumbs per hour etc. with varying degrees of importance, in order to determine whether an idea is "popular".

For example, the number of thumbs given over a specific time period (i.e. thumbs per hour over the most recent x, y, or z hours) has more weight than overall number of thumbs.

If all this sounds way too complicated, just start posting and after a while, you'll get the hang of it.