More plans for green DNC unveiled

And they're huge. The News:

Democratic National Convention staffers will use energy-saving laptops, forgo paper memos and rely on air conditioners less this summer in an effort to meet their pledge to shrink the political confab's carbon footprint.

Strict rules to use double-sided printing and to recycle equipment are also on tap, organizers said Tuesday at a briefing on the convention's green goals.

"We're only using laptops because they save up to 50 percent in power consumption compared to desktops," said Brook Colangelo, a convention committee technology expert.

Of course, they have no way of measuring whether these initiatives will actually, you know, make any difference:

Measuring what occurs may be one of the committee's biggest challenges.

"We don't have a baseline in place yet," said Damon Jones, committee spokesman. "We're still figuring out what all the pieces are."

But Jones said he expects to derive some kind of goal once the planning is complete.

"By implementing green initiatives, we're going to look at how much we could expect to save," he said. "It's hard to put a big number on that now because every convention is different, and we don't have numbers from the past."

Rough estimate: five desktop computers replaced by laptops = one
R6!8 trashcan fire.