Has anyone else noticed energy monitors are getting sexier by the minute? And none are more gorgeous than Delroy Dennisur's, which is unfortunately just a concept for now.

As other monitors, it calculates how much energy you're guzzling, and how much you can expect your electricity bill to come to, thus eliminating that awful shock when you open the letter to discover you won't be able to afford groceries for the next month.

As the amount of energy you use increases, the leaves pictured on the Power Conscience unit will grow, and even turn yellow and start to rot as you waste our planet's precious resources. Eco-friendly? Yes. A visual incentive to waste electricity just to see the leaves grow? Absolutely.

(via Gizmodo)

If, like me, you're tired of having turkey and all-butter mince pies advertised to you everywhere you look, then you might want to pop along to Animal Aid's Christmas Without Cruelty Fayre on Sunday. There will more than 80 stalls there, from a range of organisations including Viva!, PETA, Plamil Foods and the Vegan Society.

I really enjoyed last year's event, chomping my way through such delights as vegan fudge, vegan trifle (positively orgasmic, for the record!) and, of course, vegan turkey. I also picked up a lovely selection of Christmas cards from different animal charities. It was definitely a very good antidote to the meat-obsessed mainstream Yuletide marketing we're all subjected to.

The fayre runs from 10am to 5pm in Kensington Town Hall.

Related: Green things to do this weekend: tree planting days, Fair Trade fair and more.

Christmas seems a good time to remind people to use charity search engines. But remembering to always visit the same page just doesn't happen and frequently people are put off by the idea of changing settings on their browser. Fear not! Shiny Shiny is here to make it really, really easy and take away any excuses for failing in your good intentions.

Some sites, like LetThemKnowItsChristmas.com and ClickNow.org offer quick links to help you set them as a homepage, but many let you add them directly to your browser's search bar. Below are some quick tips for adding charity search engines to your search bar, and adjusting the settings so that you use them automatically, all year round.

The '80s are remembered for shoulder pads, the '90s are remembered for rave and the noughties are definitely going to be remembered for eco shopping. There are no excuses for not shopping organically when nearly every High Street store offers an organic alternative. Any store that doesn't becomes on a par with a restaurant that doesn't offer a vegetarian dish, just not good enough!

Bargain High Street retailer H&M are upping their game in Spring by offering a wider organic range. The collection will now include underwear and outerwear for women, men, teens, and children. However, the eco range will not mean hiked up prices, "Naturally our customers are concerned about the environment, but it’s also important that garments are up-to-the-minute trend-wise. Romantic styles combined with sporty influences are key this autumn with the use of denim as a complementary fabric," says H&M's head of design Margareta van den Bosch.

For the latest fashion news check out CatwalkQueen.tv

[source]

This is a great use for those chick-lit novels with that have pretty covers but are tedious as hell to read!

Rebound Designs created this cute clutch out of a book of Christmas stories, but there are over 100 other book bags here. My faves are the Nancy Drew bag, the adorable Just Cats bag. For the true intellectual are the Webster's New World Dictionary bag or even the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

This is a great use of vintage materials, and I love almost all the designs...but with the amount I cart around, I think I'd have to wait till they make one out of War and Peace!

[Via Great Green Goods]

There are plenty of entries in the green calendar this weekend, and as you might expect, green Christmas fairs are cropping up everywhere. I've included a few of these from around the UK, plus a tree-planting day for more out-doorsy types.

Central London
Head into town for some ethical shopping and MP-spotting at the Fair Trade Fair, taking place in Parliament Square. The UK's 'oldest fair Christmas event' has loads of participants on board, and runs from 12-5pm on 1st and 2nd of December at
Westminster Central Hall, Parliament Square, London SW1.

Swansea
The Swansea Christmas Green Fayre takes place on Sunday 2nd December, at the National Waterfront Museum. This will be a good one for foodies, as the green fayre's stalls will be joined by Waterfront's monthly Local Produce Market, but there's more than just mouth watering organic treats on offer here: you'll find craft stalls, tools for self-sufficient living, Oxfam charity stalls and ceramics. The event promises to be 'bigger and greener than ever', and judging by the success of last year's event, I'm sure it'll will be. You can see some pictures here.

It might be argued that the greenest way to live is without a laptop, but many find themselves unable to do their jobs without a great deal of dependence on technology. If you still want to do your bit, why not protect it with a recycled case? There are plenty around, and now Shoreline has launched a brand new range of eco-conscious laptop sleeves and jackets made out of 100% recycled plastic drinks bottles. One laptop jacket might be made out of elevent 16oz bottles and saves 7650 Btu (British thermal units) compared to manufacture of virgin fabrics, which Shoreline claims is enough to power a laptop for 149 hours.

Shoreline has set itself a target of producing a totally green production line by the end of 2008; this marks the first phase of that self-imposed commitment. The Shoreline act2 website allows you to track energy savings - in Btus - and product provenance for every item. The range includes seven sizes of laptop jackets and two sizes of laptop sleeve in Storm Blue, Toasted Almond and Jet Black, with prices ranging from $24.99 to $39.99.

[via Shiny Shiny]

I'm not even going to pretend that it's in any way green to own a supercar - even if I had the $2.3 million this one costs. Still, it's hard to believe that a car a little more powerful than the average Bugatti Veyron (if not, reportedly, as well engineered) would run purely on E85 ethanol fuel. Yet here it is. Leaving aside the long-term concerns about biofuels, that's a move in a sustainable direction that is still unusual for a supercar.

The 4.7 litre V8 engine cranks out a buttock-prodding 1018 horsepower that means this carbon fibre beauty can rattle through the gears from 0 - 62 in 2.9 seconds with a top speed of 250 mph. There is a pimped version of the Veyron doing the rounds that pumps out 1200bhp, but at these levels, why quibble over 100 horses here or there? Green? Not quite. Gorgeous? 'Fraid so.

[via Shiny Shiny]

Greenpeace could never have predicted the excitement they'd cause when they put up an online poll to name and as-yet anonymous whale. More than 11,000 possible whale names were submitted, including 'Aiko', 'Shanti' and 'Suzuki' but one clear winner is emerging: 'Mister Splashy Pants'. which currently holds 76% of the vote.

Several blogs, including boingboing and The Agitator have picked up the story, urging readers to vote for the name and there are even rumours of foul play, with an unknown user in Arizona 'clicking frenzy that was to change the face of the competition.'

Voting was due to close tomorrow, but due to popular demand (and perhaps vain hope on Greenpeace's part that the inevitable won't happen and their whale will get a respectable name), it will remain open until 7th December. Not very dignified for the poor creature, is it. I wonder what the RSPCA will have to say about this!

It's a well known fact that parents wanting to get their kids into the local church school will go to almost any length to bend the truth when it comes to getting their little darlings into a less-rough school than the local comp. But as a Hindu school in London becomes the first to enforce vegetarianism as a condition of entry, will we soon see parents pretending their kids are veggie and shopping others they've spied grabbing a sneaky happy meal at McDonalds?

The veggie entrance policy, the first of its kind to come into effect at the Krishna-Avanti school in north-west London is unpopular with Mainstream Hindus, who are claiming it favours the Hare Krishna movement - which is backing the school and whose members follow strict vegetarian diets. But with fierce competition expected for places, the rule may simply be in place as a handy selection policy.

While I'm very much in favour of encouraging children to go veggie, I'm not sure that making a rule of it is right in any circumstances. And it seems unfair to alienate a large percentage of a wider group that could otherwise benefit from living near this school. What do you think?

Ever wondered if those mountains of recycling really make you that much of a saint compared with that mysterious thing called the norm? If so, you should try a new online carbon calculator which compares your greenness with the national average in more than 50 countries, so you can feel as guilty (or smug!) as you deserve when your habits are compared with those of your neighbours.

Set up by Standard Chartered and developed by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM), the Greatest Race on Earth site hosts the first calculator of its kind, and is just as useful for people in the UK as it is for those in India, Kenya, China, Taiwan and the UAE as well as many other African, Asian and Middle Eastern cities. It's a nicely designed site too, so why not go and give it a whirl?

Here's another inventive use of old junk: a 6-foot Christmas 'tree' made from 400 Mountain Dew cans. The red and green combine to look very festive! Check it out on the video, below.

It's not been a good week for Al Gore. First the spammers hit; now it seems that those lovely people at PETA are out to get him, too. They're branding Gore a hypocrite for continuing to eat meat while campaigning for action on climate change, and they're doing it in true PETA style: yesterday a flock of mansized poultry congregated outside parliament holding placards calling Gore a 'chicken' for not going veggie, and PETA's blog tells the rest of the story here.

Of course, whether or not Gore renounces hamburgers is unlikely to have any individual effect, but you'd think he might want to set an example, particularly after the UN revealed that meat farming produces almost 40 percent more greenhouse gases than the entire global transport system. Yet Gore has remained uncharacteristically shtum on the issue of going veggie, despite initial gentle persuasion from PETA (they initially cooked him a 'faux fried chicken' dinner to coax him into making the switch) before reverting to type and launching headlong into the familiar animal-suited humiliation-antics they seem to love so much.

We had an example of organics going a bit too far yesterday, and here's an even more graphic example of recycling getting completely carried away: these hairbands - sold in market stalls and cheap stores worldwide - are made from old used condoms. Eew!

It sounds dodgy enough, and according to new claims, it is: It's reported that there's a certain risk of bacteria being transmitted to the girls, as a lot of us ladies put our hair bands in our mouths while we gather hair to put it in a ponytail.

Girls, if you're thinking of using these hair bands, please don't. They're USED condoms for god's sake! Used! They were in and on some stranger's genitals! However much you're into recycling DON'T DO IT! [Via Dollymix]

Beating nature at its own game is the story of the human race: we overcame gravity and flew to the Moon; we made mice grow ears on their backs; we even bettered the mighty earthquake by killing thousands of people with atom bombs. And now, reports the New Scientist, it looks like we're about to create a 'super-photosynthesizing leaf that will produce more leaf matter, using less solar energy and fewer nutrients'.

So is the dawn of the bionic leaf upon us? A leaf that will better nature's own 'poor' attempts at photosynthesis? No. Though I'm no scientist myself, it seems that all researchers at the University of Illinois have done is create a computer model of how a leaf works, fiddled with numbers to alter its constituent parts and noted the outcome.

Like I say, I'm no scientist, but isn't it a bit like running a computer model of the London Underground, taking out half of the commuters and announcing that it runs more smoothly. No, probably not.