Check out this interview with Bittorrent CTO Eric Klinker from Beet.tv. The interview was supposed to be about Bittorrent’s cooperation with Comcast but, as the interview was recorded on Earth Day, the interviewer asked about the environmental impact of P2P.

It turns out Klinker thinks torrents are very green and the fact that the P2P technology makes use of end user's PCs reduces the need for power hungry servers. Have a look at the video below and make up your own mind – I’m not sure that having your computer continuously switched on so you can leech and seed torrents is particularly green, but Klinker puts a pretty good spin on it.

Why do we celebrate Earth Day? According to Wikipedia, in 1969, at a conference in Seattle, Washington, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (pictured) announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration designed to thrust the environment onto the national agenda.

On April 22, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment, marking the birth of the modern environmental movement.

Today, the Earth Day international network comprises over 17,000 organizations in 174 countries, coordinating millions of community development and environmental protection activities throughout the year. Earth Day is the only event celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities. More than a half billion people participate in Earth Day Network campaigns every year.

So, time to celebrate – the Earth’s still here so it’s not too late to change how we treat it.

Here’s the latest installment in The Green Lounge’s ‘Watts Up’ series of videos. This time around we used the Watt Up power meter to measure how much electricity it takes to run a high-end gaming computer.

We borrowed a PC (many thanks to Stew over at TechnoVoyance) running a 3.2GHz AMD Athlon X2 6400+ processor, 2GB DDRII memory and an Nvidia 8800 GT graphics card with its own 512 MB of dedicated memory.

Take a look at the video for the results. Not surprisingly, it had a peak power draw higher than anything we’ve measure so far, although what was interesting was the idle power – still high at around 100watts, but not as high as the average PC we tested a couple of weeks ago. Looks like the new advances in processor technology really are making a difference to power consumption…

You’ll also notice a new section on the left-hand side bar. The ‘Watts Up?’ section is the new home for all the Watts Up videos and will hopefully grow into a decently sized green computing resource for consumers and businesses.

With the gathering momentum around green computing, many companies are looking at starting their own green initiatives. However, according to Karen Larkowski, founder and chief evangelist at the Green Computing Impact Organization, it’s not always just as simple as jumping straight into it - no serious green computing project should begin without first doing a baseline audit to know where you are starting from.

In this audit, which can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending upon how big your organisation is and how thorough you intend to be, you should first jot down some goals: is your aim to reduce the energy consumption of your IT equipment? Will you include the cooling gear? Do you want to take a comprehensive audit that includes lighting, heating, ventilation and other systems that draw power?

Federal Computer Week suggests the following three steps: