A good day for NY. See the High Line site for more info. Some good pics over at Inhabitat as well.

Just as it’s done with taxes (TurboTax) and bookkeeping (Quickbooks), the popular software company Intuit has just launched a free service aimed at helping small and midsized companies better understand their carbon footprint.

Green Snapshot pulls expense data from a company’s QuickBooks and estimates the carbon footprint of that business, providing customized recommendations of ways to go greener, save money and improve the efficiency of operations.

To create the app, Intuit partnered with Cooler, environmental software company, whose methodology, known as the Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Analysis (EIO-LCA) is backed by leading environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation. The EIO-LCA calculates emissions based on financcial and economic data..

As Joel Makower writes in his piece for GreenBiz, “since the dawn of the green business movement, small and midsized firms have been largely left out of the picture. Regulators and activists have focused on large industrial players — the ones with the spewing smokestacks, drainpipes, and dumpsters — all but ignoring the roughly 98 percent of the companies around the world that have under 100 employees” Makower continues, “Will it work? Hard to know — the product is barely a couple weeks old — but you’ve got to like the strategy: a free add-on to a popular product that provides genuine value to customers and, just maybe, to Intuit itself, all the while burnishing the software company’s green cred.”

For more visit Intuit, and check out Makower’s full article.