Gooooooooogle

We awoke to our second morning on the beautiful Californian coast in Andrew Molera State Park to continue our drive up Route 1 toward the San Francisco bay. After a few low-key hours on the road listening to Jack Johnson and taking turns with the two bus copies of Harry Potter #7, we arrived in Mountain View, CA. As we awaited our main event of the day with Google, we perused REI and a pet store while taking advantage of the city wide wireless internet to catch up on logistics planning, etc.

Later that afternoon on the Google campus, Charles Baron ’05 (who works on the climate team with company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org) greeted us for our afternoon of activities. In addition to working toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the effects of climate change, Google.org also strived to combat issues of global public health, economic development and poverty. Craig ‘Crank’ Rubens ’05, Andrew Hoffman ’05 (both formers Big Green Bussers), Charlie Guthrie ’07 and Chimpo Cahill ’07 all joined us for our tour as well and provided a welcome Dartmouth reunion for our time in the Bay Area. After showing the bus to a few members of the Google.org team, we headed over to join up with transportation specialist Ward Thomas to tour the company’s evolving hybrid plug-in vehicle program and solar panel facility. There we learned that Google owns five plug-in hybrids vehicles for company use – 10% of the total such vehicles available in the world. Additionally, they're striving to meet carbon neutrality by the end of 2007 through renewable energy generation, carbon offsetting, and improving energy efficiency.

Finally, we met with Jon Murchinson ’91 - one of Google’s senior communication managers – who gave us a tour of the company’s corporate campus before leading us to the cafeteria for a great dinner. After abandoning Nate to send Chimpo and Charlie off to the Marshall Islands, we piled into the bus to drive north to Berkeley where we camped out in Nat Smith’s backyard (Dartmouth class of 2009) though he and his family weren’t home. A quiet neighborhood and beautiful view of the city lights were all we needed to end the day.

- whitney

The BGB crew goes crazy for Google!

Fact-of-the-day: Each year, Google.com spends one percent of it’s total corporate profits toward philanthropic endeavors. To combat climate change issues, they are partnering with RechargeIT, CalCars, and the Electric Power Research Institute – among many others – to develop hybrid and renewable technologies. For more information, visit http://www.google.org/.