A new website from British energy company Npower is encouraging children to spy on their parents—to save the environment, Mark Ontkush writes on Treehugger. After completing a series of “missions” on the Climate Cops site, kids are kitted out with the necessities for keeping careful tabs on the energy-consumption habits of local adults, and are encouraged to track the folks' “energy crimes.”
The website is already generating accusations of pint-sized fascism, with its encouraging of kids to create a “Climate Crime Case File” through their snooping, to “report back to your family to make sure they don't commit those crimes again (or else)!” Infractions range from the somewhat-reasonable leaving the tap running to the befuddling keeping hot food in the fridge. (More climate change stories.)