We crashed Architecture for Humanity‘s offices last week to find out. The organization has become a media darling for harnessing open source, Web 2.0 technologies to bring greener buildings to communities from Biloxi, Miss., to Banda Aceh, Indonesia.

Architecture for Humanity shares an office space with other hip, do-good groups in San Francisco’s South of Market area.

Armed with crutches, the world’s cheapest video camera, and a week-old pink slip, I asked a few nonprofit leaders how they’re staying afloat in the tanking economy.

Carbon credit firm Climate Care pays families in India to use human-powered treadle pumps to get water out of the ground for drinking and farming. As a result, half a million foot pumps have replaced diesel ones, which pollute and cost a lot to fuel. Unfortunately, Climate Care doesn’t ensure the diesel pumps are retired instead of finding new life with other owners.

Nor does it stick around to make sure that kids aren’t doing all the pumping. It probably never crossed the minds at the British nonprofit that this would come into question. Children have done backbreaking farm work for eons in regions where sustaining an income in the field is a family necessity. And the foot pumps are supposed to be easier to operate than hand pumps.

This could raise potentially thorny problems with other people-powered technologies. Inventors and social capitalists are promoting such simple tools to help people stuck with the fuzzy end of the world’s lollipop to learn and earn more. I’m thinking of bicycle-powered computers in Laos, for instance, the Q-drum water wheel in Africa, or even the small hands cranking MIT’s XO laptop (also used, oops, for XXX).

The Times didn’t explore any side effects of using pumps with combustible diesel, like how many accidents that might cause — perhaps few next to flammable gasoline or kerosene, but still. What are the alternatives? Do affordable solar or wind pumps exist? And who might gain something from the child labor charge?

The only source in the article blaming Climate Care for child labor seems to be clean-tech consultancy Emergent Ventures India. These are heavy accusations against Climate Care, which maintains that the only children working the water pumps are on family farms — not urban dungeon sweatshops.

Carbon offsetting plans may be vain and useless at worst, but are they really evil? No matter your answer, expect to see more scrutiny of carbon credits.

People are suspicious of the notion that they can magically shop away their polluting habits. But high-profile, "lite-green" consumers, like presidential candidates, continue to adopt offsetting with fanfare.

There’s likely nothing wrong with paying programs to fund renewable energy projects or plant more trees — in fact, spill as many beans there as you can afford — as long as you examine potential unintended consequences. Those remain hard to measure. I give up.

But wait, instead of trying to pay penance for our climate-changing customs, more of us will try to cut carbons at the source. That might mean doing more manual labor in our own lives — like putting one foot in front of the other, instead of pressing that pedal to the metal.

The researchers have tested a system that can run on a quarter less than the usual amount of gas without needing any fancy fuel. With the flick of a switch, the setup alternates between regular, spark-triggered combustion and experimental homogeneous charge compression ignition.

In the latter system, premixed fuel and air combust when compressed, spewing less soot and NOx from the engine. Volvo has explored the hybrid technology, but many kinks would need to untangle before you could get behind the wheel.

If car makers adopted such hybrid gasoline ignitions, the petroleum wouldn’t get any cleaner, but less of it would be used, potentially adding a few miles per gallon of efficiency to a car. That might keep the grins up at oil companies and gas stations — but in dreamland, only for a fleeting moment, as the world weans off of fossil fuels. Right?

This and other stopgap car-greening measures of now and the near future are giving people more driving options than ever. What’s more interesting — the novelty of this innovation, or that it’s reaching the not-quite-there-yet phase of development more than a century after Daimler and Benz got props for the modern gas engine?

In a world of “bling”, the last thing a car is used for is getting from A to B; it is a symbol of wealth, power and status, and a tool for enhancing a person’s sex life … If we cannot naturally restrain the ways in which we attempt to show off, because we want to attract the opposite sex, we need to take this into account and to develop fair and robust ways of making up for our own natural limitations and of taking carbon emissions out of the ways we compete with each other.

Following that argument, then how should we remove carbon from copulation? Aren’t there already so many efforts to sex up sustainability? Hasn’t catalog porn nearly gone green? Has the ecosexual not risen? Prescott, however, believes humans grope for that cup that runneth over, but we want not if we can waste not. Framing a good time in terms of “saving” yourself or anything else sure kills the mood.

Will humanity eventually earn the biggest Darwin award ever for self-extinction, or can we save ourselves simply by lusting for this Tesla instead of my best childhood friend’s $150,000 Mercedes, and so on? Maybe we’ve got to see that Tesla ripped to shreds, like the blended iPhone, to crave it fully.

Sex and death are supposedly the easiest sells in advertising. Those two drives merge naturally as the globe heats up, so who’s doing the limp PR job to get people goo-goo eyed over Gaia?

Alas, the cute factor is conspicuously missing.

So the next time you’re dallying in digital presentations, don’t forget the pleading penguins and polar bears. More pictures of fire and brimstone would probably help too. You can find these and other slide shows on nearly any subject at SlideShare, described as “YouTube meets PowerPoint.”

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Lancome is tying its green efforts to the release of a new goo built to save your face from the ravages of the savaged environment. Are UV rays pounding through the feeble ozone layer and wrinkling your brow? The make-up maker will plant a tree for each of the first 10,000 bottles sold of its (deep breath) Primordiale Cell Defense Double Performance Cell Defense & Skin Perfecting Serum (almost as wordy as a European climate report). Prepare to see more elaborate cosmetics catering to people’s vanity, fear of climate change, and eco-generosity all at once.

However, in light of Lancome’s latest green face, animal rights activists continue to criticize its parent company L’Oreal for testing on animals.